Sources & Methodology

This library gathers 1,626 hymns from the historic worship of the Church and presents each one as a clean, readable text — with singable guitar and piano chords wherever we have charted them. Everything here is in the public domain. The purpose of this page is to be plain about where these texts come from, how we determine that they are free of copyright, and how the chord charts are made and checked, so that worship leaders, teachers and families can use them with confidence.

Where the texts come from

The hymn texts are drawn from Hymnary.org, the reference database maintained by the Hymn Society and Calvin University's Center for Church Music. Hymnary catalogs the contents of thousands of published hymnals and records, for each text, its author, the hymnals in which it appeared, and its metre. We work only from texts printed in hymnals published before 1931 — the great era of English-language congregational song, from Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley through Fanny Crosby and the gospel-song writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A hymn is often known by its first line rather than its formal title — most people recall “when peace like a river” long before they recall “It Is Well With My Soul.” For that reason we preserve the opening line of every hymn and let you search by it. The wording follows the historical printing: we keep the original spelling, capitalization and punctuation of the source text rather than modernizing it, because the text itself is a historical document and small changes can alter meaning or metre. Only obvious transcription errors are corrected.

The pre-1931 rule

In the United States, every work published before 1931 is now in the public domain. We apply that rule to the printing we take each text from, not to the date the hymn was first written: every hymn here is transcribed from a specific hymnal printed in 1930 or earlier, and that hymnal and its year are cited at the foot of the hymn's page. A hymn written in 1760 but known to us only from a 1985 hymnal would not qualify; the same hymn taken from an 1890 hymnal does. Most of the texts were written in the 1700s and 1800s, so they clear the line by a wide margin.

Outside the United States, copyright usually runs for the author's lifetime plus seventy years (as in the UK, the EU and Australia). The authors in this library are overwhelmingly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, but if you are publishing outside the US, check the author's dates for any hymn written close to 1930.

Why older printings, not modern hymnals

Modern hymnals rarely print a historic hymn exactly as it was written. Editors update “thee” and “thou,” revise language about people and God, soften or sharpen theology, drop verses and write new ones. Those revisions are new work, and they belong to the modern publisher — so a text copied from a recent hymnal can carry a copyright that the original never had, even when the hymn itself is three hundred years old.

An older printing avoids that problem and gives you something better: the words as congregations actually sang them, with a date anyone can check. Where a hymn appears in several pre-1931 hymnals, we use the most recent of those printings — by then most texts had settled into the form churches still recognize, and it remains safely before any modern revision.

How edited and modernized texts are excluded

The library is built from Hymnary.org's catalog by an automated import with deliberately strict rules. Anything that fails a rule is left out rather than guessed at:

• A positive public-domain statement.A hymn is considered only when its catalog record affirmatively states public-domain status. A blank statement is treated as unknown, not as free, and any record carrying a copyright notice, a publisher claim or “used by permission” is dropped.
• A dated printing from 1930 or earlier. Each printing of the text is checked individually; a printing with a later, missing or unreadable date is discarded.
• No modernized versions. Any printing that Hymnary classifies as a modernized or gender-neutral revision is discarded, however old the hymnal it appears in — such revisions can carry their own copyright.
• Unrestricted text only. Printings whose full text Hymnary does not make freely available are discarded.
• Nothing left means no hymn. If no printing passes every rule, the hymn is not added to the library at all.

We do not modernize texts ourselves either. After import, a hymn whose text does not parse cleanly — a stray verse in another language, only a single verse, lines whose lengths vary wildly — is held back for a person to review rather than published as-is. We name the source hymnal and year on each hymn page so every claim can be checked. This library is offered for worship, teaching and personal use; it is not legal advice. If you believe a specific text has been included in error, please tell us and we will review and, if needed, remove it promptly.

How the chord charts are made

Of the hymns here, 8 are fully chord-charted; the rest are presented as clean lyric sheets while their charts are prepared. A hymn tune is public domain on the same terms as its text, so the harmony we notate is the traditional harmonization, not a copyrighted modern arrangement. Charts are written in a natural singing key, with the chord placed directly above the syllable on which it changes.

Every charted hymn can be transposed to any key in the browser. The transposer works by the circle of fifths and spells each chord correctly for the destination key — a flat key is written with flats and a sharp key with sharps — so what you read is what a musician would actually write. For guitarists we also suggest a capo position and the open-chord shapes it produces, so a volunteer can play a hymn set in E♭ using familiar C or G shapes. Charts are proofread against the metre of the text and the traditional tune before they are published, and the transposition logic itself is covered by an automated test suite.

Corrections and requests

We are always improving the library — adding charts, fixing typographical slips, and taking requests for hymns to chart next. If you spot an error, want chords added to a lyrics-only hymn, or have a question about a source, we would be glad to hear from you. You can browse the full collection on the hymn index, and on any lyrics-only hymn you can leave your email to be notified the moment its chords are ready.