The principal tunesmiths were William Billings, Supply Belcher, Daniel Read, Oliver Holden, Justin Morgan, Lewis Edson, Andrew Law, Timothy Swan, Jacob Kimball Jr., and Jeremiah Ingalls.
Shape note singers who have kept this music alive to the present day sometimes use the term "Yankee tunesmiths", as did academic musicologists such as H. Wiley Hitchcock (1966).
All were craftsmen who worked part-time as itinerant singing school teachers, which gave them opportunities to sell their self-published tune books.
Their books were issued by Daniel Bayley in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1769, 1771, 1773 and 1774 under the title The American Harmony, or Universal Psalmodist 1769, 1771, 1773 and 1774).
At the age of twenty-three Billings had already composed more than one hundred original pieces of sacred music, and in 1770 he published his a tunebook, The New England Psalm Singer, the first book in which all the compositions were by an American.