If you set out 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 even a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes. That collection from 1764 was the largest published in America up to that time, and, although the music was all by a British composer, it was – symbolically – the first to be printed on AMERICAN-made paper.

Flagg was active in both sacred and secular music, and organized at least six public concerts in Boston. He was an important figure in the musical life of that city for about a decade, and as an impresario, arranged for some of the first Boston performances of music by the great Georg Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil (pronounced like “spaniel”) 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 Boston’s patriots.

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