Steve Schwartz writes:

>Walter Meyer replies to me:
>
>>He [Benjamin Franklin] also, as a Phildelphian, traveled to the Moravian
>>settlements of Pennsylvania - probably the most sophisticated music-making
>>in English-speaking America - Except that the music makers themselves may
>>well have been German speaking!, having settled in Pennsylvania from
>>Herrnhut in Saxony.
>
>Actually, they were mixed linguistically, German and English, at least as
>ar as the texts to their sacred music would indicate.  And they originally
>were Hussites from Bohemia who settled in Germany. ...

I have no doubt that  Ben Franklin liked to hear Pennsylvania Dutch music,
but something surely needs sorting out here. After the Thirty Year War,
which the Protestants lost, some leaders and members of the (Protestant)
Moravian Church, or Moravian Brothers, sought, and gained, refuge in
southeastern Saxony, mainly in the the town of Herrnhut there. So-called
Herrnhuter were in fact Moravian Brothers. Even when still based in Moravia
and in Bohemia (where they originated) they spoke their own Slavic tongue
but also, quite widely,  German. Herrnhut, where they later settled, was in
a part of Saxony where a couple of  Slavic dialects were widely spoken by
the common populace.

Denis Fodor