<P> "Chester" is a patriotic anthem composed by William Billings and sung during the American Revolutionary War . Billings wrote the first version of the song for his 1770 songbook The New England Psalm Singer, and made improvements for the version in his The Singing Master's Assistant (1778). It is the latter version that is best known today . </P> <P> The curious title of the song reflects a common practice of Billings's day, in which tunes were labeled with (often arbitrarily chosen) place names . Billings's song evidently has little more to do with any particular town named Chester than his famous hymn "Africa" has to do with Africa . The idea behind this practice was that by labeling the tunes independently, one could sing them to different words without creating confusion (indeed, this later did happen; see below). </P>

In billings original version chester was written for