Daniel Read (November 16, 1757 – December 4, 1836) was an American composer of the First New England School, and one of the primary figures in early American classical music. Life and work Read, along with his contemporaries William Billings, Oliver Holden, Supply Belcher, and Justin Morgan, was one of the primary members of a group of American composers called the Yankee tunesmiths or the First New England School. While the classical music era was in its heyday in Europe, American composers of "serious" music were setting hymn tunes in three- and four-part a cappella style, with simple folklike melodies and little regard for functional harmony. Many of these works were fuguing tunes, which begin with all voices singing together (with a melody usually based on a Protestant hymn), come to a stop, and continue with each voice entering one at a time. Nearly all were hymn tunes, developed for the use of the newly-forming singing societies. Once a private in the Massachusetts militia, later a comb-maker and owner of a general store in New Haven, Connecticut, Read was only the third American composer to put out a collection of his own music (after William Billings and Simeon Jocyln). This work, The American Singing Book (1785), went through five editions in the years immediately following: unusually successful for its day, making him by number of printings the most popular composer in the nation. To that must be added the number of published compilations of tunes that used his works (not always with his permission); "Sherburne", a 1785 tune originally from the American Singing Book, a setting of the Nahum Tate carol "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks," appeared over seventy times in print before 1810. Read made his living by operating a general store in New Haven, but supplemented his income by compiling and publishing tunebooks himself (which often contained his original works as well), including The Columbian Harmonist (three volumes: 1793, 1794, 1795, revised 1805, 1807, 1810) and The New Haven Collection of Sacred Music (1818). An Introduction to Psalmody (1790) was not a tunebook – in fact, it contained no music whatsoever, but was rather a pamphlet to instruct aspiring composers. Together with engraver Amos Doolittle, Read published The American Musical Magazine in twelve issues from 1786 through 1787. Read was influenced by the practices in European music in his later years, and later repudiated the compositions in the