Benjamin Titus Roberts left the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1860 over reformist convictions that would not fit inside it, plain preaching, free pews open to the poor without a rented seat, and firm opposition to slavery among them, and founded the Free Methodist Church the same year. A denomination built on those commitments needed a hymnal that carried them into weekly worship, and by 1883 the Free Methodist Publishing House in Chicago had produced one: The Hymn Book of the Free Methodist Church, reprinted again in 1896, the volume that served as the standard songbook for Free Methodist congregations through the end of the nineteenth century.
What survives of that hymnal's working life is unusually well documented. A copy held today at Greenville College belonged to Bishop W. T. Hogue, who covered its margins with handwritten notes years after its printing, marking hymns for exclusion, specifying which tunes belonged with which texts, and drafting revisions in the book's own margins. Those annotations were not idle marginalia. The 1907 General Conference commissioned a new, official hymnal, and Hogue used this heavily marked 1883 volume to guide that revision, which appeared in 1910. Some of his handwritten choices made it into the new book and some did not, which is itself the clearest evidence available that this was a working draft rather than a finished editorial statement, one bishop thinking on paper through what an entire denomination would sing next.