Entry · catalog no. 1140
Dr. Watts
/ /ˌdɑktər ˈwɑts/ /DOK-tuh WAHTS
noun · African American Missionary Baptist and Methodist congregations; concentrated in the rural and small-town South and carried north by migration · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Dr. Watts is the Black church's name for a manner of singing, not for a songbook. A leader speaks or chants out a line of text; the congregation answers by singing that line back — drawn out, heavily ornamented, unaccompanied, free of strict meter — and the two alternate to the end of the hymn. The style takes its name from Isaac Watts (1674–1748), the English Congregationalist minister whose hymn texts were among the first taught to enslaved people, but in Black usage Dr. Watts covers the whole practice regardless of authorship; Wesley, Newton and others get sung as Dr. Watts too. It is the sound of devotion, the stretch of time before preaching in old-line Missionary Baptist and Methodist churches, and it also answers to lining out, long meter, or the old hundreds.
“The deacons opened devotion with a Dr. Watts, and by the third line the whole church had come in under them.”
Origin & Attribution
Lining out entered Black practice by way of English Protestant congregational singing, where the Westminster Assembly recommended it in the 1640s for worshippers who could not read. Watts's texts reached enslaved people in Virginia through Presbyterian mission work in the 1750s, and Southern Black congregations took the practice and remade it — slowing the tempo past recognition, bending the pitches, threading it through African-derived vocal practice until the English tune underneath stopped being audible as English. The standing mainstream error is to treat it as a European survival preserved unchanged in Black churches. It is not a survival. It is a Black genre carrying a borrowed name, and its line of influence runs forward into the spirituals, gospel, blues and soul rather than backward into Watts. Watts himself is often described online as a nineteenth-century composer; he was an eighteenth-century minister and a writer of hymn texts, not music.
1707
Isaac Watts publishes Hymns and Spiritual Songs in London
1750
Watts's texts are taught to enslaved people in Virginia through Presbyterian mission work
1942
A "Dr. Watts Hymn" is recorded at Silent Grove Baptist Church, Clarksdale, Mississippi, for the Library of Congress
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
African American Missionary Baptist and Methodist congregations; concentrated in the rural and small-town South and carried north by migration · 1940s
Spoken by
Old-line Black Baptist and Methodist congregations; deacons, devotion leaders, church musicians
$DRWATTThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
48/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
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Citations & Sources
■
William T. Dargan, Lining Out the Word: Dr. Watts Hymn Singing in the Music of Black Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
book · scholarly
■
"Dr. Watts Hymn," Fisk University–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1942, AFS 06604 B01, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
recording · archival
■
+ Cite a sourceKelvin K. Towers, "Lining-Out and Performance Practice of the Dr. Watts Hymn-Lining Tradition in Three Selected African American Missionary Baptist Churches in the Northern Mississippi Delta Region" (diss., University of Mississippi, 2021)
thesis · scholarly
See also