One place I found some pretty interesting descriptions of music-making in this period was in newsletters from the temperance movement. This was in Scotland but I imagine it was the same in the US; at first the movement was politically heterogeneous but dominated by Chartists and socialists (who saw the booze business as a way for the ruling class to get their hands on the working class's money at the same time as drugging them into political inactivity). Religion didn't come into it, and the Kirk quite often took the side of the booze magnates and condemned the temperance reformers en masse as godless revolutionaries. It wasn't till the 1860s that the churches decided a better strategy was to move in and take over the campaign for their own ends.

Anyway, in this early phase the reformers needed to get musicians from wherever they could find them to provide entertainment at meetings; they didn't generally sing Christian hymns, the tone was moral but secular. And they often reported in detail on how those meetings went, even saying who sung which song and who accompanied it.

In the UK, the 1840s were the tail end of the glee club movement. Some of their songs were filthy beyond belief - there was a BBC radio documentary about it a few years ago, but they didn't dare actually broadcast them. They seem to have been like Hash House Harrier get-togethers only sung in harmony. These probably took place in the larger US cities too, but I've no idea how you'd trace them. There may be coy adverts in the papers of the time that take some decoding.