Despite its Anabaptist roots, the Ruebush-Kieffer Company did not issue this volume, its first of temperance songs, until 1881. By that time, temperance was no longer the purview of charities and individual denominations, but rather a growing international movement. Editor R. A. Glenn had been a regular contributor to Ruebush-Kieffer publications since the late 1870s. Some of his works included here would later be absorbed into Trumpet Notes for the Temperance Battle-Field, an official National Temperance Society and Publication House songbook published in 1888. Only sixty-four pages long, this slender volume was sized and priced for mass distribution at social reform meetings where it retailed at $1.50 per dozen. 

—Erin Fulton