Every one of these 41 hymns is in the public domain. Nobody owns the words. That is not a loophole or a grey area, it is simply what happens when the writer has been gone long enough and the copyright has run out. Isaac Watts died in 1748. Charles Wesley in 1788. Fanny Crosby in 1915. Their hymns belong to everyone now.
So your church may sing these words on Sunday, print them in a bulletin, put them on a screen, hand out a chord chart, record them and put the recording online, translate them, or set them to a new tune. You do not need permission. You do not need a licence. You do not owe anyone a royalty. That is worth knowing, because a small congregation can spend real money each year on reporting licences for songs that are still under copyright, and none of that applies to a hymn like Rock of Ages or Holy, Holy, Holy.
One caution, because it trips people up. The words are free, and the old tunes are free. A particular modern arrangement, a printed engraving, a chorus somebody added, or a recording of a hymn can still be owned by whoever made it. If you sing Amazing Grace from these pages you are safe. If you copy a contemporary artist's rewritten bridge, you are not. What is on this site is the public domain text and a plain chord sketch, nothing borrowed from a modern edition.
16 of these hymns are not about a psalm. They are a psalm, put into metre so a congregation could sing it. For two hundred years that was the ordinary way to sing in English churches: you did not sing your own thoughts, you sung the Bible, and somebody had done the work of making the words scan.
The best known example catches most people out. Joy to the World has no stable in it, no shepherds and no star, because Isaac Watts wrote it as Psalm 98 and the coming he had in mind was the second one. Each of these opens next to the psalm it came from, so you can read the psalm in full and then sing what somebody made of it.
Each hymn opens with chords sitting above the syllable where the change happens, and a key selector at the top. Move it and every chord on the page moves with it. There is no transposing in your head and no second chart to carry.
That is there for a practical reason. Hymns were written for congregations, not for soloists, and a lot of them sit high. A hymn pitched in A flat that nobody can sing becomes a hymn in F that everybody can. The words do not change. Only the reach does.
Every hymn page names the passage the hymn is built on, because these were not written as poetry with a verse attached afterwards. Horatio Spafford wrote It Is Well With My Soul after losing four daughters at sea. Martin Luther wrote A Mighty Fortress out of Psalm 46. Joseph Scriven wrote What a Friend We Have in Jesus in a letter to his mother, and never meant it to be sung at all. Knowing where a hymn came from changes how it lands when you sing it.
Tap any hymn in the list to open it. The text size control makes the words big enough to read from a music stand or a pulpit. The dark setting is easier on the eyes in a dim room. The whole hymnal works with no signal once you have opened it, so a church basement with no bars is not a problem, and there is nothing to install and no account to make.
It is free because the hymns are free. 41 for now, and more as they are set.