Synopsis

If you wanted to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name Josiah Flagg.

Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

He was a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes, published in 1764. Although the music was all by a British composer, it was — symbolically — the first to be printed on American-made paper.

Acting as an impresario, Flagg also organized concerts in Boston for about a decade and gave some of the first Boston performances of music by George Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which proved to be his last. He included excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, but closed with his band’s rendition of the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of the Boston patriots.

Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early music history.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Greenwood The Hessian Camp First Michigan Colonial Fife and Drum Corps Private release

G.F. Handel (1685 – 1757) Water Music English Concert; Trevor Pinnock, cond. DG 439 147