Milton a Poem copy B, plate 2. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Rare Books, call number 54041. Image courtesy of the William Blake Archive.

Blake’s stanzas from the preface to Milton a Poem, better known as the hymn “Jerusalem,” are by far the most popular of his poems to have been set to music. While researching versions for a book on “Jerusalem,” I discovered references to some 406 audio recordings and scores (a total that I suspect may still be expanded upon). These date from 1908—when Henry Walford Davies published the first in England’s Pleasant Land, a set of three-part songs—to the reinterpretation of Hubert Parry’s hymn by Tokio Myers and Jazmin Sawyers for the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Donald Fitch’s catalogueDonald Fitch, Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). was published in 1990 and thus misses the vast majority of recordings that appeared following the introduction of the CD in the late 1980s; he also omits more or less completely popular music versions, which had already begun to appear in the postwar period.

The fame of “Jerusalem” stems, of course, from Parry’s composition in 1916, when he was persuaded by Davies and the poet laureate, Robert Bridges, to set Blake’s words to music in the service of Fight for Right, a group that sought to rouse the morale of the nation in the depths of the First World War.See Keri Davies, “Blake Set to Music,” Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker, eds., Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) 189-208. Over the ensuing century, Parry’s hymn would be sung and heard again and again, whether performed by church choirs or in Women’s Institutes, or listened to on shellac 78s, vinyl albums and singles, CDs, or, in more recent times, via audio streaming.

Of the many hundreds of releases, this list has been deliberately restricted to a selected discography of fifty recordings. While that Top 50 is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, it does prevent some of the monotony that comes from the succession of compilation discs in particular. Easily half of the versions I have discovered in recent years are repackaged earlier recordings, such as The Great British Street Party 2012 (“120 Classic Songs and Anthems to Celebrate the Jubilee!”) or the version by the Liverpool Cathedral Choir on the 2004 compilation Perfect Wedding Classics.

The list therefore tends to focus on versions of “Jerusalem” that are unusual in some way. A few cases (marked with an asterisk) are original settings that owe nothing to Parry’s composition. Most are arrangements that differ from Parry’s original unison choral setting or his and Edward Elgar’s later orchestral arrangements. One consequence of this is that the list frequently privileges popular music versions, simply because a variant for guitars or synthesizers is immediately recognizable compared to classical recordings. This is by no means a comment on the quality of those recordings or my own preferences: some of the popular versions here are included because they offer a notably different version of a familiar song and, novelty aside, are otherwise better forgotten. Alongside popular releases, I have tended to include early records that are often significant as the first publicly available choral or orchestral recording.

As it is a discography, this list deliberately omits scores—most notably Parry’s own versions for unison choir and then for orchestra, as well as Davies’s soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (SATB) setting from 1908 or later arrangements of Parry, such as G. T. Thalben-Ball or the popular military brass-band version by Charles Hoby. Also omitted are versions that only sample the hymn or use it as a starting point (such as Nobody’s 2009 rap song “Jerusalem” and the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s 1991 “It’s Grim Up North”), as well as albums and songs that simply allude to parts of the poem or to its themes (including Tim Blake’s 1978 Blake’s New Jerusalem, the Verve’s 2008 “Love Is Noise,” and Marc Almond’s 2014 The Tyburn Tree).