James Rivington: Music Purveyor in Revolutionary New York
By Lance Boos
Printer and bookseller James Rivington arrived in New York in the autumn of 1760 with a hoard of books, pamphlets, sheet music, and instruments ready for sale. Rivington (the namesake of Rivington Street in lower Manhattan) went on to become a prominent figure in New York: he was a fervent Loyalist propagandist during the American Revolution, a spy for the Americans late in the war, and one of the first merchants in the American colonies to import and advertise a significant amount of music.[1] Ever ambitious and competitive, Rivington cultivated a musical marketplace in New York City in the 1760s and ’70s, as well as rivalries with other printers as they frequently copied each other’s successes.
James Rivington
James Rivington was born in London in 1724, and with his brother John took over his father’s bookselling and printing business in 1742. Their partnership dissolved in 1756, and James Rivington started a new shop on Paternoster Row with James Fletcher. The bulk of the pair’s business was printing sermons, but they also advertised books on philosophy, politics, history, and poetry. Music was only a small portion of their business, but they did publish a book of psalms in three parts, as well as a few anthems.[2] Rivington also undercut competitors by selling pirated reprints at a lower cost, and offering very favorable terms to American clients.[3] The partnership with Fletcher soured within a few years, likely owing to Rivington’s costly penchant for gambling on horse races. Rivington & Fletcher dissolved their firm and declared bankruptcy in 1760.[4] By the end of the year, Rivington had migrated to America and established shops in New York and Philadelphia.[5]
In October of 1760, Rivington announced his arrival in New York, proclaiming in an advertisement that “James Rivington, bookseller, from London, has this day opened a store” in Hanover Square, and listing several types of books and other goods. His extensive musical inventory included fiddles, strings, flutes and recorders, reeds, brass mouthpieces, instruction books for all of these instruments as well the harpsichord, and “a choice collection of new musick, with all the latest and best single songs, set for the German flute and fiddle,” as well as marches, minuets, and blank staff paper. Rivington immediately became and continued to be among the most prolific advertisers of printed music, emphasizing secular songs, chamber music, and composers to a degree that was novel in the American market.[6]
Rivington embodied a musical-cultural connection to London through both his importation of sheet music, and reprinting popular secular song lyrics that originated in Britain. He evidently found such success with the latter that other printers sought to mimic his style, if not his content in its entirety. Such copying was common practice in the 18th-century publishing trade, especially in areas such as music that did not enjoy robust copyright protection.[7] Despite being in competition with one another, colonial printers often collaborated on large projects such as books and almanacs in order to reduce costs and share labor.[8] Cooperatively or not, however, Rivington’s music business clearly influenced and was influenced by other printers in New York. Hugh Gaine, his main rival, advertised a comparatively small musical inventory in the 1750s — mostly psalms and hymns, which reflected the generally religious nature of the American musical marketplace. When he advertised secular music, he did so in generic terms such as “select songs” or “a collection of songs.” He did not mention specific titles, or include instruments or orchestral and chamber music. Seeing Rivington’s apparent success in the marketplace, however, Gaine followed suit and began advertising bound staff paper, fiddles, strings, bows, and flutes.[9]
The title page of Rivington's American Mock Bird
Rivington’s first published contribution to the American musical marketplace was the songster The American Mock-Bird. Songsters were books of song lyrics that often lacked music notation, but frequently included the title of a familiar melody that fit the text each song. Like broadside ballads, they assumed that a repertoire of familiar and applicable melodies circulated among the readers. At least according to the title page, Rivington published The American Mock-Bird in 1760, shortly after his arrival in New York, although he did not advertise it in New York until March of 1761.[10] One month earlier, New York bookseller Abraham Thorne had begun advertising The Mock Bird; or New-American Songster, emphasizing the novelty of the songs and quality of the paper and printing.”[11] No copy of Thorne’s songster is known to survive, so it is not clear how similar it was to Rivington’s Mock-Bird, or which was actually published first.[12] In 1758, New York bookseller Garrat Noel had included an American Mock-Bird in a list of books recently imported from London, raising the possibility that Rivington may have either reprinted the book or at least borrowed its title. Rivington did, after all, have a reputation for pirated editions. Like Thorne’s book, no copy of Noel’s 1758 book survives, but Noel did use the title again in 1764, selling The American Mock-Bird, or, Songster’s Delight. Samuel Brown, who was Rivington’s business partner at the time, printed it for Noel. This particular edition does survive, and is substantively different from Rivington’s in both its layout and selection of songs. Hugh Gaine also advertised that he would soon publish a New American Mock-Bird in the summer of 1761, although this book does not survive for comparison.[13]
Individual secular songs were rarely advertised by name in American papers until the 1790s when such music began to be printed domestically. Generally they were advertised generically as “songs,” or “new songs set to music.”[14] Rivington occasionally added such detail, advertising a collection of “Scots Songs” and others, naming several of the individual titles, such as “Down the Burn Davy, Love,” “The Banks of Dee,” and “Gramachree, Molly.”[15] Most of these songs also appeared in several British and American songsters in the late 18th century, indicating that Rivington was keeping up with popular tastes.
Rivington's ad for a newly published songbook (this was the American Mock Bird, which he simultaneously advertised in Philadelphia with the title), New York Mercury, March 16, 1761
During the Revolution, Rivington remained New York’s preeminent music merchant, routinely advertising imported sheet music, instruction books, and instruments for sale at his shop, and promoting concerts as well. While the instruments that Rivington sold were generally smaller ones such as flutes, violins, and guitars, he did periodically offer larger keyboard instruments.[16] If he faced supply problems, as many merchants and printers did during the war, it was not reflected in the copious musical inventory he routinely advertised. Hugh Gaine remained in the bookselling and printing business and continued to advertise music, but never with the same frequency or quantity of inventory as Rivington.[17] The musical instruments advertised in Gaine’s paper during the Revolution were more often sold by other merchants instead of Gaine himself, although very few of these merchants specialized exclusively in music. George Deblois and Peter Goelet included flutes and violins but no sheet music in lengthy lists of sundry imported goods for sale. Bookseller Valentine Nutter, like Gaine, merely listed songbooks and psalm books, but eventually added a few small instruments, reeds, and strings to his inventory in the 1780s.[18]
In 1773 Rivington established a newspaper of his own, using his press to bolster the Loyalist cause. His paper went on hiatus in 1775 when a band of Liberty Boys led by Isaac Sears smashed his press and drove Rivington to flee to London. He returned to New York in 1777 and supplanted fellow Loyalist Hugh Gaine as the city’s official royal printer after the British military had captured the city.[19] Loyalists from around the colonies poured into occupied New York seeking protection, and in them Rivington found a solid base of customers and subscribers.
In addition to essays and letters, Rivington’s Loyalist propaganda included printing political songs in his newspaper. In October of 1778, Rivington published an untitled song to the tune of the widely known song “Derry Down.” The song satirized the Patriot cause, characterizing the Revolution as a Shakespearean farce that had reached its conclusion with the realization that rebels would soon lose the war, and closing with an affirmation of reconciliation and friendship. This song was almost certainly not written by Rivington himself, as songs published in newspapers were generally submitted to the publisher by a member of the community, and the reconciliatory tone was not in line with Rivington’s more antagonistic brand of Loyalism. Two months later Rivington published a song in tribute to the British light infantry, submitted by a soldier. A 1780 song, submitted by “a Loyalist” but credited to a refugee, was much more direct in its critique of the American cause. It repeatedly referenced their alliance with France and thus a tie to Catholicism and threat to Anglicanism, and articulated a fear of enslavement at the rebels’ hands — turning a frequent Patriot talking point against itself.[20]
The pinnacle of Rivington’s musical propaganda was the songster Songs, Naval and Military, which he advertised in March, 1779 as forthcoming, and as just published the following month, available for one dollar.[21] The book contained the lyrics of 120 songs that, according to the preface, “have a tendency to excite that love of our King, of our country, and of Liberty, which, in the breasts of Englishmen, are one and the same thing.”[22] These songs would have been familiar to the Loyalists of New York, as most had already been published, and were collected from the London theater and the ballad tradition. Few related directly to the Revolution, but many had once been topical songs about Britain’s previous victories over France and Spain. The handful of songs with a romantic theme dealt with a soldier or sailor leaving or returning to his beloved, such as “All in the Downs the Fleet was Moor’d,” which had already been in circulation for decades. Rivington also included David Garrick and William Boyce’s “Come Cheer up my Lads,” better known as “Heart of Oak.” This song premiered in the pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion in 1759 to celebrate British naval victories over France that year. It quickly became widely known throughout the empire, and its melody was the basis for several similarly popular lyrics deployed by the Americans, most notably a “Liberty Song” written by John Dickinson in 1768 in protest of the Townshend Acts.[23] By including it, Rivington reminded his readers of the song’s original triumphant and patriotic text.
Hugh Gaine
Not to be outdone by his rival, Hugh Gaine followed with a loyalist songster of his own later that year, advertising his Loyal and Humorous Songs in October.[24] Gaine’s edition was both more varied and topical than Rivington’s, including poems and odes, acrostics, toasts, a letter, and a number of songs about the Revolution itself, including some direct responses to Patriot propaganda. In the British tradition of using “Yankee Doodle” to mock the American colonists, Gaine included twelve new verses of the song alongside a recitative and cantata about the American “Sons of Faction” who were the true threat to liberty.[25]
Rivington’s fortunes changed with the end of the war, as he lost subscribers and customers when the British military and many Loyalists evacuated New York. His newspaper ceased publication at the end of 1783, and his shop soon followed. While his turn as a spy allowed him to remain safely in New York until his death in 1802, his reputation and business never recovered from his abrasive Loyalism, and the once affluent Rivington fell into poverty in his final years.[26] The city’s musical life, which he had done so much to build, moved on without him. In the 1790s as a new generation of merchants and printers such as James Hewitt, Benjamin Carr, and George Gilfert took his place and began publishing a significant amount of notated music domestically.
Lance Boos is a PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. His research examines how music circulated commercially in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World, and the creation of a musical marketplace in which British culture was disseminated, negotiated, and refashioned during and following the American Revolution.
[1] On Rivington’s spying, see Catherine Snell Crary, “The Tory and the Spy: The Double Life of James Rivington” William and Mary Quarterly 16 no. 1 (Jan. 1959): 61-72.
[2] Charles Humphries and William C. Smith, Music Publishing in the British Isles, From the Earliest Times to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century (London: Cassell and Company, 1954), 275; Edith B. Schnapper, ed., The British Union-Catalogue of Early Music Printed Before the Year 1801 (London: Butterworth’s Scientific Publications, 1957), 977.
[3] These favorable terms included discounts on bulk purchases and extending credit for a full year rather than the customary six months. Stephen Botein, “The Anglo-American Book Trade Before 1776: Personnel and Strategies,” and Cynthia Stiverson and Gregory Stiverson, “The Colonial Retail Book trade: Availability and Affordability of Reading Material in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” in Printing and Society in Early America, eds. William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983).
[4] Isaiah Thomas, A History of Printing in America, 1815; Joseph M. Adelman, “Trans-Atlantic Migration and the Printing Trade in Revolutionary America,” Early American Studies 11 no. 3 (2013): 537; Pennsylvania Gazette, April 28, 1757; Boston Evening-Post, May 5, 1760.
[5] The Philadelphia shop closed by 1767, and he also operated a shop in Boston from 1762 to 1765, when his Boston partner William Miller died. For the rest of career, Rivington focused exclusively on New York.
[6] New York Mercury, October 6, 1760. New York Gazette, October 31, 1763. He was rivaled only by Michael Hillegas in Philadelphia, who offered a similar list of sheet music and instruments, but also included a harpsichord. Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia), December 13, 1759.
[7] Nancy A. Mace, “Litigating the ‘Musical Magazine’: The Definition of British Music Copyright in the 1780s,” Book History 2 (1999): 122-145.
[8] Joseph M. Adelman, Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 39-41.
[9] New York Mercury, November 11, 1752, running weekly until the end of the year; June 4, 1753, running monthly until October; April 9, 1759, running weekly until the end of the month; New York Mercury, May 2, 1763; December 3, 1764; April 29, 1765; January 27, 1766; July 27, 1767. An especially striking element of the Rivington-Gaine competition involved the names of their shops. Rivington boasted of operating “the only London Book Store” while Gaine laid claim to the “Only Old London Book-Store and Printing Office,” perhaps adding the latter detail to distinguish himself as having a deeper and more longstanding connection to New York City’s print culture. New-York Gazette, May 11, 1761; New-York Gazette, January 12, 1761; New-York Gazette, May 4, 1761. Boston bookseller and printer John Mein also began using the London Book Store name in 1765, and advertised psalters, librettos, songbooks, and occasionally sheet music. Boston Gazette, October 7, 1765; Boston News-Letter, May 28, 1767. See also Ruma Chopra, “Printer Hugh Gaine Crosses and Re-Crosses the Hudson,” New York History 90 vol. 4 (2009): 271-285.
[10] The American Mock Bird: Containing a Collection of the Most Favourite Songs Now in Vogue (New York: James Rivington, 1760), Evans 8528. New-York Mercury, March 16, 1761.
[11] New York Gazette & Weekly Post-Boy, February 26, 1761.
[12] Thorne’s songster is listed as unlocated in both Irving Lowens, A Bibliography of Songsters Printed in America Before 1821 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1976), and Robert Keller’s Early American Songsters: 1734-1800 Source List. https://www.cdss.org/elibrary/Lowens1/Indexes/Srclist.htm
[13] New York Mercury, June 26, 1758; The American Mock-Bird, or Songster’s Delight. Being A choice Collection of entire new Songs, as they are now sung by the best Singers at all the publick Places of Diversion in England (New York: S. Brown, 1764), Evans 41428; New York Mercury, March 16, 1761. Evans catalogued Gaine’s Mock-Bird as 8940, but listed it as unlocated, as did Lowens.
[14] The first was likely a September 5, 1768 advertisement for an engraved copy of “Liberty Song” in the Boston Chronicle. Benjamin Carr, a music publisher who migrated from London to Philadelphia in 1793, began regularly advertising songs by their individual titles as he published them.
[15] Royal Gazette (New York), February 19, 1780.
[16] Rivington’s New York Loyal Gazette, October 25 and November 22, 1777; Royal Gazette (New York), December 23, 1778.
[17] New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, August 30, 1779, June 8, 1781.
[18] New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, December 3, 1770, January 13, 1777, July 27, 1778, September 28, 1778, October 21, 1782.
[19] James Rivington, “James Rivington, Bookseller, Printer, and Stationer, in New-York. Proposes to publish a Weekly News-Paper…” Broadside, (New York: James Rivington, February 15, 1773). Evans 12982; Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City During the Revolution (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 41-42, 90-91.
[20] Royal Gazette (New York), October 24, 1778, December 23, 1778, January 29, 1780.
[21] Royal Gazette (New York), March, 6 and 10, April 14 and 21, 1779.
[22] Songs, Naval and Military (New York: James Rivington, 1779) Evans 16530.
[23] Dickinson’s version began appearing in American newspapers in July of 1768, and spurred a number of responses set to the same tune.
[24] New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, October 11, 1779.
[25] Loyal and Humorous Songs (New York: Hugh Gaine, 1779). Evans 16326. The only surviving copy is incomplete.
[26] Judith Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 184-185; Crary, 71.