Wednesday, November 11, 2026
written by Ilona Kubiaczyk-Adler
Look just beneath the tune name at the bottom of the hymn page. You will find a string of numbers, something like 8.6.8.6, or sometimes a pair of letters: CM, LM, SM. It looks like a code, and it is one, but it is a very friendly code.
The numbers count syllables. Let’s look at No. 649 “Amazing Grace.” Say the first line of Amazing Grace out loud: A-maz-ing grace, how sweet the sound. That is eight syllables. The next line, that saved a wretch like me, has six. Then eight again: I once was lost, but now am found, then six: was blind, but now I see. Eight, six, eight, six. That pattern is the hymn’s meter, and CM, which you see underneath the hymn title, is shorthand for “Common Meter.” It is so called because it was the most widely used pattern in the era of psalm-singing and early English hymnody.
Here is the delightful part. Any text with that pattern can be sung to any tune with that pattern. The tune and the words only need to share a shape.
So the words of Amazing Grace fit House of the Rising Sun, without changing a syllable. Try it. It is a little startling, and then it is a lot of fun. The same words also fit O God, Our Help in Ages Past, or When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, or O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, and many more.
That is why a hymn’s tune and text can be matched, separated, and rematched across generations. The meter is the matchmaker. A text from one century can find a melody from another, and the two will fit as if they had always belonged together. Sometimes they do belong together. Sometimes a congregation discovers that a familiar text comes alive on an unfamiliar tune.
Isaac Watts, the great eighteenth-century hymn writer, used Common Meter constantly, often in his paraphrases of the Psalms. It is easy to see why. Eight syllables, a breath, six syllables, a breath: the pattern feels natural to English speakers. It also turns up well beyond the church, in folk ballads and in poetry, which is why it is sometimes called “ballad meter.”
Common Meter has relatives. Along with Long Meter and Short Meter, it was one of the handful of patterns that carried most of the church’s English singing for generations. Long Meter (LM) is 8.8.8.8, as in the Doxology, Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Short Meter (SM) is 6.6.8.6, as in Breathe On Me, Breath of God. Double versions, marked with a D, simply run the pattern twice.
And this is what the Metrical Index of Tunes in the back of the hymnal is for. It groups every tune by its meter, so you can look up 8.6.8.6 and see every melody that could carry those words. The Metrical Index starts on p. 1003.
This week’s challenge: open to any hymn in Common Meter and sing it to a different tune from that same list. Or try the old favorite: sing Amazing Grace to House of the Rising Sun in the kitchen, and find how cool the feeling of cracking the code is!
Next time: the hymnal is not one tradition but many. We follow seven streams of song to the places they began.
Click here to read - A Hidden Treasure: The Red Book in Your Pew (Part 1)
Click here to read - A Hidden Treasure: The Red Book in Your Pew (Part 2: Indexes)
Click here to read - A Hidden Treasure: The Red Book in Your Pew (Part 3: What’s in a Name?)