One unexpected composition to include among Billings's other political works is his psalm-tune Shiloh, the opening composition in The Suffolk Harmony. Unusual among all the texts as published in his tunebooks, Shiloh is explicitly signed by Billings and it includes an extensive set of footnotes printed with the separate complete version of the text facing the psalm-tune itself.

In describing Billings's own text, McKay and Crawford point out the difficulty of dealing with the extensive annotations.

The solutions proposed by McKay and Crawford relate first of all to Billings's possible need to document the celebration of Christmas in the context of a Congregational society that throughout much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries actually opposed any celebration on 25 December. Their second proposed solution is that the documentation of Shiloh was Billings's response to the criticisms he had sustained as an editor of the Boston Magazine in 1783.

There is merit in both of these proposals, but there is also a strong third possibility that Shiloh is more than a simple Christmas carol.5 Though Shiloh is the only text in Billings's tunebooks with annotations, it is not the only text Billings published with biblical citations. They were also included in the broadside version of the text to his anthem Samuel the Priest gave up the Ghost, which was first sung at the funeral of Rev. Samuel Cooper on 2 January 1784, and later also published in The Suffolk Harmony. It would seem unlikely that Billings would have added annotations to “Samuel the Priest” and Shiloh just to demonstrate his own biblical erudition.