“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is a classic spiritual song from the African American tradition. It may have been composed by Minerva and Wallace Willis. Here are two arrangements of this song.
The first arrangement is by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. They published their arrangement in The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs (New York: Biglow & Main, 1872). Notice that their arrangement has the first note (“Swing…”) sung on the downbeat; this is different from a common contemporary interpretation of the song where the first note is a pickup measure. The original arrangement of the Fisk Jubilee singers had a fermata over the second note of the opening phrase (“…low…”), and again later where the word “low” is sung; I have omitted the fermata, both because it may confuse congregational singing, and to make this arrangement more consistent with the next arrangement.
The next arrangement is derived from Harry T. Burleigh’s 1918 arrangement of this song for piano and low voice. Burleigh was arguably the first great African American composer of art music; he studied with Dvorak, and helped introduce Dvorak to American folk music. One of the verses and one of the choruses of Burleigh’s piano accompaniment can be easily and logically transcribed for SATB choir, as in the following arrangement.
“Go Down, Moses” is a classic spiritual song from the African American tradition. The earliest known publication was in 1862, in an arrangement derived from a song sung by escaped slaves.
This arrangement comes from the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, perhaps the first African American musical ensemble to tour internationally. They published their arrangement in The Story of the Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs (New York: Biglow & Main, 1872). Their version has 24 verses, telling how Moses led the Israelites to freedom (Exodus 12:29 through Exodus 14 in the Hebrew Bible); other verses mention other matters outside of this basic story. See Historical Background below for how this sacred song has been used as a song of freedom.
Historical background: Harriet Tubman used this as a code song when she was helping enslaved persons escape to the north. Sarah Bradford, in her biography of Tubman, (Auburn, N. Y.: W. J. Moses, 1869), pp. 26-27, wrote: “I give these words exactly as Harriet sang them to me to a sweet and simple Methodist air. ‘De first time I go by singing dis hymn, dey don’t come out to me,’ she said, ’till I listen if de coast is clar; den when I go back and sing it again, dey come out. But if I sing:
‘Moses go down in Egypt,
‘Till ole Pharo’ let me go;
‘Hadn’t been for Adam’s fall,
‘Shouldn’t hab to died at all,’
den dey don’t come out, for dere’s danger in de way.'”
Performance notes: The Fisk Jubilee Singers were first recorded more than three decades after their founding, after many changes of personnel and music directors. In spite of the lapse of time, those early recordings are the best indication we have for the vocal style of the nineteenth century Jubilee Singers. These early recordings reveal a disciplined ensemble with light vibrato, careful enunciation, and precise intonation; a few early recordings are available online at the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project, U.C. Santa Barbara. The spare arrangement of “Go Down, Moses” seems to demand discipline, care, and precision in performance. However, the fluid melody is tolerant of the vagaries of congregational singing, and the simplicity of the arrangement means that the average congregation can learn how to sing this song in 4 part harmony.
For an introduction to this sacred song project, including information on copyright, click here.
If your congregation is going to webcast your worship services, you obviously have to be careful of copyright issues. Music, especially, can cause problems: those who hold rights to music can be especially aggressive at enforcing their copyright.
This is further complicated by the fact that more than one person or entity may hold the copyright to a piece of music you wish to webcast, e.g., there may be one copyright on the music and another copyright on the arrangement, and still a third copyright on the lyrics.
Furthermore, you can’t trust the attributions in hymnals. For example, “How Can I Keep from Singing” is widely credited as an old Quaker hymn when it was composed by Robert Lowry in 1869; some of the arrangements published in hymnals are not by Lowry but are copyrighted; and the verse beginning “When tyrants tremble sick, with fear” is attributed to “Traditional” when it is copyright 1950 by Doris Plenn.
And it’s not just webcasts that cause copyright problems. By law, you cannot photocopy any copyrighted tunes, texts, or arrangements (no, not even for an insert in an order of service); nor can you project them onto a screen during a worship service.
So I decided to come up with fifty or so hymns, spiritual songs, chants, etc., that can be safely used without worrying about copyright issues. The tunes, texts, and arrangements either are in the public domain — either that, or they are my arrangements of text or arrangement to which I hold copyright but which I freely permit nonprofit organizations to perform, webcast, record, or project during services.
Update, October, 2016: The project was getting out of hand, so I decided to limit it to American sacred songs, generally with American texts, tunes, and arrangements (though in a few cases I’m including a little bit of English material).
I chose to retain the copyright for two reasons: first, so someone else can’t slap their copyright on my work and profit from it (and yes, Virginia, it has been done); and second, because Creative Commons did not offer exactly the kind of license I wanted. Note that I also retain copyright of the typesetting for all public domain material.
I had another powerful motivation for producing this collection: it should be quite useful for small congregations and house churches that cannot afford to purchase expensive hymnals. A small congregation with a tiny budget can photocopy as many copies as they want; they can project these sacred songs, record them or webcast them, and the congregation can do it for little or no money.
One caveat: I did not research international copyrights. Those who live in the European Union or elsewhere may find that material that is in the public domain in the United States is still protected by copyright in their jurisdiction.
Over the next year or so, I will be posting draft versions of sacred songs from this collection. You are welcome to use them in your congregation — and if you do, I’d love to hear from you if you liked it, or if you ran into any problems.
If you spend any time with kids, you likely know the song “Down by the Bay”:
Down by the bay, where the watermelons grow,
Back to my home I dare not go,
For if I do, my mother will say:
“Did you ever see a….”
Then you improvise a last line with the name of an animal, and something absurd that rhymes with the animal: “Did you ever see a fly, wearing a tie?”
We’re going to sing this song at camp this summer, so I wanted lots of verses, subject to the following rules:
1. The verses had to be kid-friendly (i.e., no cheetahs drinking margaritas).
2. Only one verse per animal
3. No repeating rhymes (i.e., once you rhyme frog with dog, you cannot rhyme dog with frog)
4. Try to have as many different verbs as possible
I now have 48 verses, from various sources (Web, oral tradition, writing a few new ones). Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to add even more verses, subject to the above rules. Note that the verses below are listed in alphabetical order by animal.
1. an ant, eat an elephant?
2. a beagle, flying with the seagulls?
3. a bear, combing his hair?
4. a bee, with a sunburnt knee?
5. a beetle, threading a needle?
6. a bunny, eating milk and honey?
7. a cat, swing a baseball bat?
8. a chicken, do some guitar pickin’?
9. a chimp, flying in a blimp?
10. a cockatoo, playing a kazoo?
11. a cow, with a green eyebrow?
12. a crab, drive a taxicab?
13. a deer, throwing a spear?
14. a dog, chopping a log?
15. a duck, in a pickup truck?
16. an eagle, married to a beagle?
17. a fish, do a hula in a dish?
18. a fly, wearing a tie?
19. a fox, hiding in a box?
20. a frog, hopping on a dog?
21. a giraffe, who really made you laugh?
22. a goat, in a ferry boat?
23. a goose, kissing a moose?
24. a hawk, knitting a sock?
25. a hog, going out to jog?
26. a horse, on a golf course?
27. a kangaroo, tying her shoe?
28. a lizard, dressed for a blizzard?
29. a llama, wearing striped pajamas?
30. a lobster, shooting at a mobster?
31. a mink, at the skating rink?
32. a moose, drinking apple juice?
33. a mouse, build a great big house?
34. a mule, swimming in a pool?
35. an octopus, who liked to swear and cuss?
36. an owl, drying on a towel?
37. a pig, dancing a jig?
38. a platypus, in a shuttle bus?
39. a rat, with a great big hat?
40. a seal, on a Ferris wheel?
41. a sheep, driving a jeep?
42. a slug, give a bug a hug?
43. a snail, with a dinner pail?
44. a snake, baking a cake?
45. a spider, drinking apple cider?
46. a turkey, who liked to eat beef jerky?
47. a whale, with a polka-dotted tail?
48. a yak, doing jumping jacks?
(N.B.: If you post an additional verse on Facebook, I’ll assume you give me permission to repost on my blog.)
Is the famous song “This Little Light of Mine” an African American spiritual? Or was it composed by Harry Dixon Loes and Avis B. Christiansen around 1920?
Attributions to the African American tradition
Many hymnals and songbooks attribute “This Little Light of Mine” to “African American Spiritual,” or more generally to “Traditional.”
An influential source: Lift Every Voice and Sing II: An African American Hymnal, ed. Horace Clarence Boyer (New York: Church Publishing, 1993), has the following attribution: “Words: Traditional. Music: Negro spiritual, adapt. William Farley Smith (b. 1941)”. The melody of this version resembles the melody collected in 1939 by Alan Lomax, as sung by Doris McMurray of Huntsville, Texas.; this recording is available online here.
An equally influential source is Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs by Guy and Candie Carawan (Montgomery, Ala.: NewSouth Books, 1963/2007). The Carawans give a somewhat different melody, and attribute this as “Traditional song” (p. 21). They provide documentary evidence that indicates the song was included in the “Highlander Song Book” (p. 25), a songbook that would date from the 1930s. Incidentally, the Carawans provide a bridge that is not included in the hymnals I’ve consulted.
In addition to the audio recording by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1939 (see above), “Let hit shine” was collected by Ruby Pickens Tartt, and published in “Honey in the Rock”: The Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection of Religious Folk Songs from Sumter County, Alabama (Mercer University Press, 1991, p. 5; words only). Note that like the Lomax version, this version was probably collected in the 1930s. The editors do not provide any guidance as to when Tartt collected this particular song, but they provide the following editorial comment, without documentation: “Widely performed by choirs and gospel groups during the 1930s, a favorite on gospel radio shows, ‘Let hit shine’ is now also in white folk tradition.”
The words to “This Little Light” are collected by Steven Gould Axelrod, Camille Roman, and Thomas J. Travisano, in their book The New Anthology of American Poetry: Modernisms, 1900-1950 (Rutgers University Press, 2005), on p. 605. The editors add the following editorial comment: “Harry Dixon Loes (1892-1965) wrote and composed this song with Avis B. Christiansen (b. 1895). The pair also wrote the hymns ‘Blessed Redeemer’ and ‘Love Found a Way’.” This attribution, coming as it does from a well-regarded university press, carries some weight; however, the attribution is not documented.
Typical of the stories told about the song is that told by Ace Collins, in his book Music for Your Heart: Reflections from Your Favorite Songs (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2013), p. 191: “During his studies [at the Moody Bible Institute], Loes was struck by the significance of three different references to light in the New Testament…. Using light as an inspiration and coupling it to a melody that carried the feel of a spiritual, Loes wrote ‘This Little Light of Mine.’ Yet the song, which is today almost universally known, took a while to take off. Although written in 1920, it would be in the days just before World War II that churches began to adopt ‘This Little Light of Mine’ as a part of Sunday school programs. Within a decade, Loes’s song was translated into scores of languages and sung all over the globe.” Collins provides no documentation whatsoever for any of these assertions.
Although the song was supposedly composed c. 1920, I was unable to find a reference to it in the Catalog for Copyright Entries for the years 1920 and 1921; however, Loes might have copyrighted the song later than 1920.
Hymnary.org shows no publications in hymnals prior to about the late 1930s; see graph here. However, Hymnary.org does not include every single U.S. hymnal from the twentieth century.
Wikipedia attributes the song to Loes, but does not document the source for this attribution. The Wikipedia page was created July 26, 2007, and many online sources (and probably many print sources) unquestioningly accept the Wikipedia attribution in spite of the lack of documentation; therefore, be wary of any source published 2007 and later that attributes the song to Loes.
The Web site Hymntime.com does NOT list “This Little Light” as one of Loes’s compositions. Note that Hymntime.com gives Loes’s dates as October 20, 1892 to February 9, 1965; the birth year is different from the birth year given by Wikipedia.
Conclusion and questions
The fact that folklorists collected the song after Dixon’s purported composition date of circa 1920 indicates that the song could have passed quickly into the folk repertoire soon after composition. However, assuming Loes did indeed write the song (or if Loes co-wrote it with Christiansen), where and when was it first published?
If Loes wrote the melody, what was his original version? Similarly, if the melody is an African American spiritual, what is the earliest recorded version of the melody?
Loes was white, so if he wrote the song, how did it become associated with the African American tradition?
In the absence of firm answers to these and other questions about the origins of this tune, the most careful attribution for this song would be “Unknown.”
NOTE: See the update below for a brief biography of Windom.
I’m trying to track down Aaron Bash Windom, a mid-twentieth century composer of gospel music from St. Louis. One of his better-known songs was “Let Us Sing Till the Pow’r of the Lord Come Down,” often known as “Now Let Us Sing.”
My best guess is that Windom was born in 1910, and died in 1981. The Catalog of Copyright Entries, Third Series, vol. 2, part 5A, number 1, Published Music, January-June 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Copyright Office, Library of Congress, 1948) reveals that his name is Aaron Bash Windom, that he was born in 1910, and that he was the sole owner of A. B. Windom Studio, St. Louis, Mo. The Find-a-Grave Web site has a photo of a grave stone of Aaron Bash Windom who died in March, 1981, at age 70; the grave stone is in Saint Peter’s Cemetery, Normandy, St. Louis County, Missouri.
Windom is mentioned in passing in Horace Clarence Boyer’s The Golden Age of Gospel ([University of Illinois Press, 1995], p. 138): “Two other S. Louis natives who were important figures in gospel between 1945 and 1955 were Martha Bass and A. B. Windom. … Windom, a one-time accompanist for Mother Smith, composed several gospel songs: her ‘I’m Bound for Canaan Land’ and ‘I’ve Got the River of Jordan To Cross” became gospel standards.'” Several other sources indicate that he taught piano; in a couple of places he is referred to as “Professor A. B. Windom,” though I don’t know if he was affiliated with a school or college, or if he, like many other music teachers, was accorded the honorary title lf “Professor” by his students and local community.
The gospel song “Let us sing till the pow’r of the Lord come down” was published in St. Louis, Mo., and is copyright 1948 by A. B. Windom Studio. If you look around online, you can find recordings of it by various musicians. Some online discographies seem to indicate that he made some recordings of his own music, but I can’t confirm that.
But I have no idea if he was white or black; if he played anything besides gospel music; to what extent he made his living as a performer, a teacher, and/or a composer. I cannot find him in the 1930 or the 1940 U.S. Census. Was he married? Did he have children?
If anyone out there knows anything about him, I’d love to hear.
Update, Feb., 2023
Here’s my best effort at a brief biography for Aaron Bash Windom, based on the information listed below, plus information from the comments. Some of this is a little bit speculative, but given how little information we have, this will have to do.
Aaron Bash Windom, known as A. B. Windom, was born on September 11, 1910, in Missouri. Nothing is known about his early years. By 1941, he was publishing his own compositions in St. Louis, often under the imprint “Studio of A. B. Windom.” In addition to being a gospel composer, he also taught music, and his students called him Professor A. B. Windom. He was also a performer, and both sang and played piano.
On February 17, 1949, he married Selma B. Hurd. Born c. 1903, Selma was from East St. Louis, Ill., across the river from St. Louis, and was the daughter of Baptist minister Rev. B. M. Hurd.
Although all his published compositions were gospel music, Windom taught classical piano. As one of his students remembers, “He was very well versed in music theory as well. Gospel music is not all he knew. He was a light-skinned Black man, [and] eccentric. I still miss him.” At least one of his students went on to become a professional musician, the gospel composer Rev. Robert Mayes (1942-1992).
Windom served for forty years as the minister of music at Christ Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church in St. Louis, circa 1940 until his death. In 1966, he served on the Devotional Literature Commission of the Progressive National Baptist Convention.
His gospel compositions were recorded most notably by Mahalia Jackson, and also by less well-known performers such as Martha Bass, the Golden Harmoneers, the Clara Ward Singers, etc. His 1948 composition “Let Us Sing Till the Power of the Lord Come Down” (a.k.a. “Now Let Us Sing”) has been recorded a number of times and is widely sung by church choirs. “This song has even entered the folk tradition to the point where”Now Let Us Sing” has entered the oral tradition, passed from singer to singer; unfortunately in the process Windom’s authorship has sometimes been forgotten.
Windom died on February 28, 1981. He had turned over his school at 3905 Evans Street, St. Louis, to Professor Lee Cochran, Jr., who continued to teach music there. Selma, A. B.’s wife, died on February 26, 1994. They are buried together in St. Peter’s Cemetery, Normandy, St. Louis County, Missouri.
Research notes:
(1) Be sure to read the comments. There is some material there from people who knew him.
(2) I’ve found some genealogical information about Aaron Bash Windom. I assumed that the birth year listed in his copyright entries (1910) was correct. Beyond that, “Windom” is an unusual spelling.
(a) I was not able to find him in the 1920, 1920, 1940, or 1950 U.S. Census. That doesn’t mean he’s not there; sometimes names get horribly mangled by the census takers. But I was unable to track him down.
(b) Aaron Bash Windom and Selma B. Hurd were married on February 17, 1949, in St. Louis, by Rev. E. R. Williams. See attached photostat of the marriage record (from Familysearch.org). With such an unusual name, spelled exactly as it appears on his copyright records, this is pretty definitely our A. B. Windom.
(c) Aaron Bash Windom is in the Social Security Death Index, found via Familysearch.org. Date of birth, September 11, 1910; date of death, February, 1981 (no day given). Since he was buried in early March (see below), I’d assume he died in late February.
(d) According to Find-a-Grave, Aaron Bash Windom died in March, 1981 (though actually, this was probably the burial date; see above for a Feb. date), and he was buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery, Normandy, St. Louis County, Missouri. Interment.net summarizes the interment record as follows: “WINDOM, Aaron Bash, age: 70, burial: 03/07/1981, Section: 28, Block: O, Lot: 28.00, Grave: 1.”
This source (which collates public records) has the following information: “WINDOM, AARON was born 11 September 1910, received Social Security number 498-14-7067 (indicating Missouri) and, Death Master File says, died February 1981 [Source: Death Master File (public domain)….] WINDOM, AARON B. died 28 February 1981 in Missouri, U.S.A. Special thanks to Reclaim the Records.” Given the dates of death, I feel pretty confident that both these entries are for our A. B. Windom.
(e) Selma died in 1994, according to Find-a-Grave (this corresponds to the information in the comments below) and she is also buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery. Interment.net lists her as “WINDOM, Selma B., age: 91, burial: 2/26/1994, Section: 28, Block: O, Lot: 28.00, Grave: 2”; in other words, she’s buried next to A.B. (but darn it, I wish they’d given her full middle name). This also gives Selma’s approximate birth year as 1903. That means she was about 46 years old when she married A.B. Windom; thus it’s no surprise that they didn’t have children together. Another source gives her date of death as February 19, 1994 (using information found on reclaimtherecords.org).
Once I knew Selma’s approximate birth year, I could do more research on her life. Our Selma is probably (but not definitely) the Selma B. Hurd born in 1903, and found in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 U.S Census, living with her parents in East St. Louis, Illinois, right across the river from St. Louis, Mo. Her parents were B. M. Hurd (born in Georgia; first name also given as Morgan) and Lusette Hurd (born in Alabama; first name may be Lucetta, Luretta, or Susetta). B. M. was minister of a Baptist church, and is listed in the American Baptist Yearbook for 1910 (p. 151); he is probably the B. M. Hurd who died in 1937. Lusette doesn’t appear in the 1930 Census; she is probably the Lucetta Hurd who died in 1922 and is buried in the same cemetery, in the exact same section, as B. M. Hurd. Note that Selma was Lusette’s second child, for the 1910 census shows she has two living children, though only Selma is living with Lusette in that year (Lusette was about 40 when she had Selma); also note that Lusette married B. M. circa 1901, and this was her second marriage. Also, the 1920 Census lists Selma, Lusette, and B.M. as black.
Given this information on Selma, we might be able to go a little further. A woman named Selma Hurd of East St. Louis, Ill., married Carl L. Jamerson, also of East St. Louis, on September 22, 1930 — there may have been two women named Selma Hurd in East St. Louis in 1930, but I’m betting that it’s the same woman; and if this is the same Selma who married A. B. Windom, then it was her second marriage. However, note that A. B. Windom did not marry Selma Jamerson; which could mean that these are not the same woman, or it could mean that Selma took back her maiden name after her marriage with Jamerson ended.
Be cautious with any of this information about Selma. I found no definite connection between the Selma Hurd of East St. Louis, Ill., and the Selma Hurd of St. Louis, Mo., who married A. B. Windom. They’re probably the same woman (it’s a somewhat unusual name), but they’re not definitely the same woman.
(3) A. B. Windom is mentioned in the minutes of the “First Annual Midwinter Planning Session” of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., January 19-20, 1966, held at Christ Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church, St. Louis, Missouri: “Professor A. B. Windom of the host church sang a solo, ‘Come unto Jesus'” [for the Thurs. morning, Jan. 20, session]; he was also listed as a member of the “Devotional Literature Commission.” These minutes are bound with the Minutes of the Fourth Annual Session of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Sept. 7-12, 1965 (p. 165).
(4) I found a number of copyright listings and publication listings for A. B. Windom, but did not have the patience to go through all those listings looking for bits good information (e.g., where the copyright holder resides, etc.). Below is what my quick search turned up for sheet music publications. These are of interest because they place Windom in St. Louis in the 1940s, and show that he published his own music. It also shows that he had connections to Chicago.
1941: “The First Started Burning in My Soul” (27458 Cass, St. Louis: A. B. Windom) 1942: “You’ve Got the River of Jordan To Cross,” with P.D. Johnson and Theodore Frye (Chicago: Theodore Frye) 1945: “There’s Rest for the Weary” (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) 1947: “I Got To Run to the City Four Square (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) 1948: “Let Us Sing Till the Power of the Lord Come Down” (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) 1949:”Oh Lord Remember Me” (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) 1949:”You Got To Stand Your Trial in Judgment” (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) 1954: “Peace, Peace in Jesus” (St. Louis: A. B. Windom Studio) (Sources: Emory Univ.; eBay listings; U.S. Copyright listings)
(5) A. B. Windom is mentioned in a few published reminiscences about the mid-twentieth century gospel music scene — search Google Books — but most of this material either is not available on Google Books, or says little more than “I remember A. B. Windom.”
Here are Lamm’s nine reasons, which I have re-interpreted based on my experiences in Unitarian Universalist congregations:
1. I’m far less likely to sing if I don’t know the song. Yes, I can read music, but unless it’s a pretty straightforward song I’m not going to be able to sight-sing it. And just because a soloist with a microphone sings it doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to sing it the first time through, or even the tenth time through.
2. I’m not going to sing it if the song isn’t really suitable for congregational singing. Those syncopated rhythms that sound so nice when the professional musicians sing or play them? those melodies that go way up into the stratosphere? — most of us out in the congregation don’t have the chops to sing them.
3. I’m not going to be able to sing if the song is pitched to high. The average congregational singer is an untrained baritone or mezzo, which means the comfortable range for them is going to be A up about an octave and a half to E flat. However, if you pitch songs in the lower end of that range, the sopranos and tenors are going to complain; and if you pitch songs in the upper end of that range, the basses (me!) and the altos are going to complain. The best range for most congregations is going to be an octave from C to C. (By the way, Kenny Lamm gets this wrong in the original post; he pitches songs for baritones and mezzos, and forgets about the rest of us.)
4. When I can’t hear the people around me singing, it takes a lot of courage to actually sing, so I’ll only sing songs that I know well (and even then, I’ll be more tentative). That means if the accompanist is too loud, and drowns us out, I’m not going to be able to hear the people around me. And if the ceiling is too high, so all our voices get lost up there, I’m not going to be able to hear the people around me. This is one of the reasons I don’t like singing in the Main Hall of the UU Church of Palo Alto: the ceiling of the Main Hall is so high, it’s hard to hear anyone singing.
5. Musicians and worship leaders who don’t understand the delicate art of accompaniment intimidate me, and I won’t sing. That fabulous soloist or worship leader with the incredible voice? — I’m not going to humiliate myself by trying to compete with them. The “accompanist” who obviously isn’t listening to us and doesn’t know that we’re struggling? — I’ll just listen to them and not bother to sing along. I like a g good accompanist who listens to the congregation and supports us when we sing, but there are very few good accompanists out there. (We’re lucky at the UU Church of Palo Alto that we have two professional musicians, Veronika Agranov-Dafoe and Bruce Olstad, who actually understand how to be an accompanist, and when one of them is playing I’m more likely to sing.)
6. If there’s doubt in my mind whether the worship leaders want me to sing, then I’m less likely to sing. That really awesome worship service with the high production values? I know they don’t really want me to sing, because my voice will just lower the quality. That worship leader who mumbles the name of the hymn and shows no joy that we’re going to be singing it? I suspect they don’t really care about the hymn, they just had to stick something in there. In either case, I’m less likely to sing.
7. Professional musicians like to keep throwing exciting new songs at congregations. Ministers like to choose hymns because the lyrics fit in with the sermon topic. Both these ways of choosing hymns fail to take into account a fundamental aspect of human nature: we like to sing the same songs over and over again. In one congregation, a wise elder told me how to chose hymns: she gave me a list of fifty hymns that she knew the congregation loved to sing, and I chose from that list whether the hymns fit the service or not. Once a year, we would drop two or three under-utilized hymns and add two or three new hymns — and each of those new hymns we’d sing once a week until the congregation knew it. That congregation sang pretty well.
8. If the soloist or accompanist adds all kinds of runs and trills and arpeggios and whadda-ya-call’ems — and if no one is actually singing the melody along with me — I’m likely to give up. And it’s while it’s great to have those high sopranos singing the melody, those of us with voices an octave down would appreciate it if someone could sing the melody in our range, too.
9. Finally, to state the obvious, if the worship leader isn’t paying attention to make sure I’m following along, don’t expect me to sing. For example, when the worship leader tells me how much they love this song, and they sing at the top of their lungs but they don’t help me sing it well and, worse yet, they’re not even aware that I’m struggling out here in the pews — not only am I not going to sing, but I might just ignore the sermon as well.
It is a rare song that’s appropriate at both Christmas and Hallowe’en season, but the much-beloved “Good King Kong Looked Out” (from A Consort of Christmas Carols by P.D.Q. Bach [1807-1742]) is one such carol. The thought of good King K. squinching through the snow made me want to illustrate this traditional carol, using much-modified public domain images….
Once upon a time, I had a copy of John Renbourn’s recording “A Maid in Bedlam” on cassette tape. I used to play that cassette tape while driving up to the White Mountains to go hiking. I think this was before I had a car with a cassette player — I have a vague memory of Gary, one of my hiking partners, playing this tape on his boom box in my beat-up Chevy Celebrity. The point is that this was a while ago.
This recording captured me with its mix of musical influences. This was a time when early music was still something new; Renbourn’s band performed tunes by Renaissance composers Hans Neusidler and Tielman Susato on recorders, steel-string guitar, and tabla. Was this folk music, or early music, or world music? Or, given the strange harmonic direction they took in the medley of tunes by Neusidler, were they dabbling in new music? And they did strange things to traditional tunes from the British Isles as well: the traditional “A Maid in Bedlam” had that non-traditional the tabla, and the recorders, and the steel-string guitar, and a little bit of rock and roll. “A Maid in Bedlam,” though a traditional song, had a flavor of contemporary folk. The medley “The Battle Of Augrham / Five In A Line” definitely slipped into rock and blues territory. As for “Reynardine,” it was as sexy and crazed in its own understated way as the punk rock that I listened to obsessively.
Much of the music from the late 1970s and 1980s that I used to listen to obsessively has not held up well; a lot of it now sounds heavy-handed, or poorly done, or just plain boring. Much of Renbourn’s music still sounds fresh and interesting, no doubt due in large part to his high level of musical intelligence and his virtuosity on his chosen instrument, the steel-string guitar. But perhaps most important was his ability to mix musics from different cultures and different times, have it make emotional and musical sense, and not leave you feeling as though he had simply been plundering other people’s music. How many musicians can cover five centuries and three continents, avoid pastiche and misappropriation, and still make musical sense? — not many.
Not that Renbourn’s entire career was so brilliant. In fact, most of his career was musically boring. Too often, Renbourn slid down into that musical performance realm inhabited by technical virtuosi who make their living impressing wanna-be guitarists with blistering fingerwork and fretboard hysterics. Renbourn’s topical songwriting was never particularly interesting; he was not a singer-songwriter worth paying attention to. His early forays into Renaissance music were wonderful, but the early music world kept evolving and I don’t feel he managed to keep up with that ongoing musical conversation. And then there was the 1990s reunion of the 1960s band Pentangle — like so many reunion bands, 1990s Pentangle just plowed the same musical ground over and over and over again.
But when he was good, John Renbourn was very, very good:— when his technical brilliance was in the service of his musical intelligence; and when he saw beyond the musical world of British folk and pop to an expanding world of cultural influences; then he was very, very good.
John Renbourn died of a heart attack on Thursday.
Above Renbourn at Customhouse Square, New Bedford, Massachusetts, July, 2005. We lived a block away at the time of this performance, but I was out of town at a conference. [Photo from Flickr by Thom C CC BY 2.0]
When the New York Times Book Review asked which literary figure was overdue for a biography, Ayana Mathis argued for Albert Murray. She was persuasive enough that I decided I had better read some Murray, and that led me to the book he co-wrote with Count Basie, Good Morning, Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie: a book for which Basie supplied the reminiscences, and Murray wrote the text.
Good Morning, Blues reminds me of Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography: both books are, above all, a record of how one artist worked; Trollope was a writer and Basie was a bandleader, which makes for some significant differences, but both are really books about work. Just as Trollope’s autobiography is filled with details of how he came to write his various books, Basie’s autobiography is filled with details of the various bands and combos he put together. The most interesting part of both books comes early on, when the artist serves his apprenticeship; the least interesting part is the ending, but then, autobiographies can never come to a interesting ending because the ending of a life story that we really want to know about is how the person died.
Because Basie’s book is about his work, he avoids dishing dirt, fanning the flames of feuds, or talking much about his personal life. “I don’t want to get into all that,” Murray frequently has him say, and in fact I can just about hear Count Basie saying exactly those words. Basie passes lightly over his first experience of the South’s Jim Crow laws (though he says from his point of view, there wasn’t much in Jim Crow that he hadn’t already experienced in the North). He spends less than two pages on his wife’s death, and perhaps a paragraph on his daughter’s birth. He spends a couple more pages on his own heart attack, but then his heart attack meant he had to take time off from work.Aside from that, he talks about his work — though as Murray has him say: “But truthfully, playing music has never really been work.” Again, you can just about hear Basie saying exactly those words; Murray gets his voice just right, and makes it feel as though it’s Basie’s words you’re reading, even though you know that this book has been carefully writer by a master of American prose style.
I like his music, but I was never a big fan of Basie’s, and sometimes the book devolves into a jazz fanboy’s dream with a little too much minutiae about who played tenor at one specific recording session, and who “cut out” just before which gig at the Famous Door in New York City, and who filled in for them, and so on. But I tolerated all that, and even read it with interest because obviously Basie himself cared a great deal; as a bandleader, who played with him, who was in the band, which personalities were involved in making music at a certain point of time, is of critical importance.
When I finished reading, I had all sorts of unanswered questions about Basie’s life. What about all those hard feelings that are hinted at, then dismissed with, “I don’t want to get into all that”? What about the hints of tough times in his family life? What about the racial discrimination that — to use his phrase — “sepia performers” had to put up with? In the last few pages of the book, Murray has Basie address this last question:
“If I haven’t spent a lot of time complaining about all of these things, it’s not that I don’t want anybody to get the impression that all of that was not also a part of it. It was. So what? Life is a bitch, and if it’s not one damn thing, it’s going to be something else.”
For Basie, what was most important was his work. That’s what he wanted to tell about. And that’s what Albert Murray perfectly captures, making Basie’s words echo the jazz he played, so even the prose style is just what you’d want to hear from a bandleader who cared most about the work. So rather than bothering with trying to read up on Basie’s life, I went online and listened to a whole bunch of his music, from the 1930s right up to the 1980s. Nothing else I could read was going to be as good as Albert Murray’s book, anyway.
Above: Still from “Jazz Casual” television program, KQED, 1964 — looking over the shoulder of jazz guitar great Freddie Green, towards Basie at the piano. Clicking on the photo takes you to the half hour show on Youtube, which features Basie’s rhythm section in 1964: Basie on piano, Green on guitar, Sonny Payne on drums, and Norman Keenan on bass.
