A free hymnal, and the stories behind the hymns

We have put a hymnal online. It is free, it needs no account, and it lives at xtraamerican.com/hymns. Fifteen hymns to begin with, and more coming in batches.

There is no shortage of worship apps. Nearly all of them want a subscription, an account, or a slice of your attention to sell on, and nearly all of them are built for the person holding the guitar. This one is built for the person singing.

It opens as a hymnal, not a chord chart

Large readable words and nothing between you and them. If you play, Show chords is one tap and gives you the full chart in whatever key suits your voice, with the capo worked out. Most people will never press it, and that is the point.

Lyrics first · chords one tap away

Search any line

Nobody remembers what a hymn is called. They remember a fragment. Type prone to wander and it lands on the third verse of Come Thou Fount; type sea billows and it finds It Is Well With My Soul. Every line of every verse, and it works with no signal once the app has loaded.

Nobody remembers titles · everybody remembers a line

Every hymn carries its story

This is the part we care about most, and the part nobody else bothers with.

Horatio Spafford put his wife and four daughters on a steamship in 1873 and meant to follow. The ship went down in twelve minutes and all four girls drowned. His wife survived and sent him a telegram of two words: saved alone. Sailing out to meet her, the captain called him up to say they were passing over the place where it happened, and he wrote It Is Well With My Soul there. The phrase is not even his. It belongs to the woman in 2 Kings 4 who says it is well when asked about the son lying dead upstairs.

Joachim Neander wrote Praise to the Lord, the Almighty and liked to walk in a valley near Düsseldorf. After he died the locals named the valley after him. In 1856 quarrymen working it found some old bones in a cave, and because the valley carried his name, the species got named after the valley. Neanderthal means Neander’s valley. He has been dead three hundred years and his name is on this hymn and on a branch of the human family.

John Newton captained a slave ship and was good at it, and stayed in the trade for years after his conversion, which he never tried to hide. The word wretch in the first line of Amazing Grace is not poetic humility. He meant himself, and he meant it precisely.

And the scripture underneath it

Here I raise mine Ebenezer is the line everyone sings and almost nobody can explain. In 1 Samuel 7 the Philistines are driven back and Samuel sets up a stone and calls it Ebenezer, saying hitherto hath the LORD helped us. It is a rock in a field marking the exact spot where God turned up.

Every hymn links straight through to its passage in the King James Bible, which already lives on this site and is free to read.

Moved up from G · the capo works itself out

A note to start on

Tap it and the app sounds the starting pitch, so you are not guessing in a room with no piano. Move the hymn up a tone and the note moves with it. There is also a link out to hear real people sing it, because a synthesised tune is no substitute for a congregation.

Why it is free

Because it already belongs to everybody. Every hymn here is in the public domain — the newest was published in 1875, the oldest, Luther’s A Mighty Fortress, in 1529. You may sing them, print them, project them on a Sunday morning and pass them on without asking anyone, ourselves included.

Modern worship is a different matter. It is under copyright, licensed for good reason, and you will not find it here.

Putting it on your home screen

On iPhone, open it in Safari — it has to be Safari — tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, open it in Chrome, tap the three dots, then Install app. Either way it gets its own icon, opens full screen, and works with no signal.

Open XA Hymns

More about the hymnal