I forgot I'd transcribed this for another group some time back. Includes some tune names for your too.

The following is from a biography of Adam Clarke born between 1760 and 1762 in Londonderry, Ireland. It is describing his early teens, so it would be mid 1770's. He was from a Protestant family. Italics are that way in the original.

Quoting begins here As it was fashionable as well as decent for all those who attended Divine worship on the Lord's day to take a part in the public singing, (for choirs of singers, the bane of this part of religious worship, were not known in those times,) so the youth spent a part of the long winters' evenings in learning what was called sacred music. A person less or more skilled in this art set up a night school in some of the most populous villages; and the young people attended him for two of three hours, so many nights in the week. All had books in which the same tunes were pricked; and each tune was sol fa'd, till it was tolerably well learned, and then sung to some corresponding words. Afterwards, each was obliged to give out some verse of his own; and lastly, as trials of skill, one made a line; by the time that was sung, another was obliged to find a line that would match in measure and meaning, a third did the same, and a fourth in the same way concluded the stanza; neither of these knowing any thing previously of the subject on which he should be obliged to compose his verse: these trials of skill often produced much doggerel, but there were, not unfrequently, some happy lines and flashes of real wit. Sometimes this contest lay between two persons, the second of whom had no more than the time in which the previous line was sung, to make that which was to be its correspondent, both in sense and measure.

[Section tracing this method of singing and making alternate verses back to Ancient Greece and Rome omitted]

It may be added that, their sacred tunes were few, very flat, and mostly of common and long measure; and probably of Scottish extraction. Tunes entitled French, London, York, Abbey, Elgin, Dumfries, Newton, Dublin, &c, &c, and the Old Hundreth Psalm, were some of the chief: and one or other of these tunes might be heard in every church and meeting house through a whole district or county on the Lord's day.

[Stuff on 'Papist' funeral singing to follow if anyone tells me they're interested.] A.C.'s singing master apparently included dancing in the later part of the lessons. There's too much for me to post on how he fell under the spell of dancing with all its 'perverting influence' at the age of 12 or 13, but did not long continue.

Found in: An account of the infancy, religious and literary life, of Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S. &c. / written by One who was intimately acquainted with him from his boyhood to the sixtieth year of his age ; edited by the Rev. J.B.B. Clarke, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge. -- New-York : B. Waugh and T. Mason, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1833. Vol. 1, p. 34-35