The archives seem to have been well combed over by the authors of William Billings of Boston (1980), the eminent American music historian Richard Crawford and his co-author, David McKay, who did most of the archival digging. Significant spadework was also conducted by editors of the four-volume Collected Works, one of whom was Crawford.
My own search of family records, death notices, and wills in the New England Historic Genealogical Society turned up previously unreported discoveries. I found details about William Billings’ wife Lucy Swan’s family, based in Stoughton, Massachusetts, as well as about their eldest daughter, Abigail, her husband Amos Penniman, and their descendants. For years I’ve harbored a fantasy that a trove of personal papers might surface in someone’s attic, or mis-catalogued in a dusty archive. At this point that seems highly unlikely. There are many aspects of Billings’ experience, including some of the most important ones, researchers may never have access to.
But his life was too rich and interesting to leave alone. Billings seemed to me a bona fide Boston working-class hero and Renaissance man: he composed music, he wrote hymns and fanciful stories, he tanned leather. Could I write Billings into a historical novel, based on extensive research into his life and times, but filling out the many details of his personal life absent from the archive? That would solve the problem of the dearth of sources. When historical details are nonexistent, make them up. Not usually considered sound advice to historians, granted, but possibly warranted under these circumstances.
There were some other and possibly better reasons to attempt fiction. One had to do with audience. I thought historical fiction might be a way to reach a broader readership than a standard biography would, especially for a less familiar name like Billings. The challenge of writing in a different genre also appealed. During the pandemic I published my first novel, Learning from Loons, and mostly enjoyed the process of fictional invention.
Billings’ life certainly had a novelistic quality. It followed a kind of fall, rise, and fall—not quite rags to riches and back, but close. He began life with some advantages. He apparently received some early schooling. But at age 14, Billings’ father died, leaving his wife and children nothing from his estate. He was apprenticed to a tanner and began learning the trade, while also picking up sufficient knowledge of music to become a singing school instructor. Soon he began composing his own music, and at age 24 published his first tunebook.