A Musical Paean to America

Over the century and a half after William Billings’s death in 1800, many winters wore away at the composer’s gravestone, as visitors tiptoed around it to pay their respects to portrait artist Gilbert Stuart, interred nearby at the Central Burying Ground on Boston Common. America’s musical cognoscenti viewed Billings as a historical curiosity—technically the first American-born-and-bred professional composer, but lacking the European polish that would have elevated his work into high art.