Psalm Setting
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Through-composed musical settings of complete biblical psalms — the actual text or a close versification, not a loose worship paraphrase — usually delivered in acoustic folk language: fingerpicked and strummed guitar, piano, fiddle and cello, close male-female or duo harmonies, and dynamics that track the psalm's emotional arc from lament to praise. Sons of Korah add Middle-Eastern and flamenco colors with hand percussion and minor-mode modality, while Poor Bishop Hooper and Sandra McCracken work in spare, hymn-like piano-and-guitar folk; Shane & Shane bring polished acoustic-CCM harmony arrangements. Because the psalm supplies the form, songs often abandon verse-chorus structure for sectional, text-driven shapes, and imprecatory or lament psalms keep their darkness rather than resolving into radio uplift. The congregational wing (Wendell Kimbrough, My Soul Among Lions) writes singable metrical melodies deliberately descended from Reformed psalter practice.
History
Descends from Reformation metrical psalmody — the Genevan Psalter (1539–1562), Scottish Psalter (1650), and exclusive-psalmody denominations that still sing only psalms; the modern recorded genre began when Australia's Sons of Korah formed at the Reformed Theological College in Geelong in 1994 and built a five-album catalog of full-psalm settings, followed by a 2010s American wave — The Psalms Project's Vol. 1 (2012) launching a plan to set all 150 psalms with a different vocalist per psalm, Shane & Shane's Psalms (2012) and Psalms II (2015), Sandra McCracken's Psalms (2015), Wendell Kimbrough's church-focused Psalms We Sing Together (2016) — and culminated in Poor Bishop Hooper's EveryPsalm project, which released one psalm per week from January 2020 until all 150 were recorded, a milestone covered by The Gospel Coalition.
Defining artists
Essential listening
- Psalm 121 — Sons of KorahSpotifyYouTube
- Psalm 23 (Surely Goodness, Surely Mercy)(2015) — Shane & ShaneSpotifyYouTube
- My Help, My God (Psalm 42)(2015) — Sandra McCrackenSpotifyYouTube
- Rejoice in All Your Works (Psalm 104)(2016) — Wendell KimbroughSpotifyYouTube
- Psalm 85 — Poor Bishop HooperSpotifyYouTube
- Psalm 45 — Poor Bishop HooperSpotifyYouTube
Sources
- Sons of Korah official site, "Giving a fresh voice to the biblical psalms", https://sonsofkorah.com/
- The Gospel Coalition, "A Song for Every Psalm, Released Weekly for 150 Weeks", https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/song-every-psalm-released-weekly-150-weeks/
- Jesus Freak Hideout, review of The Psalms Project "Volume 1: Psalms 1-10", https://jesusfreakhideout.com/indiemusic/inspection/ThePsalmsProjectVolume1.asp
- Discogs, "Wendell Kimbrough – Psalms We Sing Together" (2016), https://www.discogs.com/release/11838953-Wendell-Kimbrough-Psalms-We-Sing-Together