BBC Songs of Praise

BBC Songs of Praise was published in 1997. It traced its origins from two sources: the original Songs of Praise (SofP, 1925, SofPE, 1931), and the popular BBC television programme, ‘Songs of Praise’, in which congregations from various parts of the British Isles were seen, and individuals were invited to choose hymns. That programme, in the words of the Preface, ‘has made churchgoers aware of songs and hymns from beyond their individual traditions, and has been able to popularize newer music on a previously undreamed of scale’ (p. vii). This suggests a radically new hymnbook, and in some respects it is. It is ‘neither a revision of the original Songs of Praise, nor “a book of the...