Modern Tunesmith

So William Cleary, composer of SH 562 Mournful Joy, has an entire book of original compositions, all set to words from Isaac Watts that don't occur in other books, titled Song & Shield, which can be purchased here. I like a lot of the songs in the book of course, but I think this one manages to be my favourite (though Deadly Snare is pretty close second). It's also, so I'm told, named in honour of his girlfriend which is doubly sweet I think.

Sometimes I try composing all-new tunes, but a good chunk of the time I'm actually working off of existing hymn tunes I have access to. This one's a fun arrangement of a classic bit of English mediaeval music, the Agincourt Carol (without the Deo gratias refrain), to which I set Tate & Brady's psalm 29, which seemed to fit the mood of the arrangement I'd put together.

This is one of those songs that I wish had more verses in the Green book, so I've picked one from E. A. Hays' text to add onto the end that I think makes the best pair. I've also sung the tenor part in octaves, so much of the low rumbling is actually the tenor part on the A below the bassline, which I think is a great effect. Doubling like that is something I've been enjoying doing.

It's always bothered my that the Sacred Harp arrangement of Old Hundredth is sung to the first verse of Tate & Brady's psalm 95, rather than psalm 100. So here's me singing it to the (originally Scottish) words I grew up singing to the tune.

This one's by a personal friend, who has other songs not in the Sacred Harp I'll post some recordings of soon. It's always fun discovering aspects of a song you never realised were there before, like the alto part here is super neat.

'By the Waters of Babylon/There we sat down/yay. yay we wept/when we remembered Zion.'

Most people probably know of Psalm 137 from the Rastafarian song that Boney M and a couple of other people have covered, but it really doesn't work for me emotionally. It's a lamentation over a lost homeland (with a couple of verses of really human, violent rage at the end that tend to get left out), so why not sing it to music that actually conveys that? This is one such; it's in the Shenandoah Harmony, though not with these words that it had originally in the Southern Harmony, which it shares also with another favourite of mine Bondage (ShH 167). There's really six verses of this version of the psalm, but I'm only singing three because those are the ones I have in my head.

This is a tune I've dug up from the Shenandoah that I don't think I've seen recorded yet anywhere. It's very much a Yankee Tunesmith composition, by Joseph Stone this time, and I very much enjoy the way in which the harmony kind of freely moves around and the individual parts enjoy their own melodies (I'm usually a sucker for a minor-key tune that modulates to the subdominant/relative dorian key for a bar or two, especially if it's an a-minor tune that gives a d-dorian modulation; see also the Shenandoah Harmony arrangement of Hick's Farewell for a different usage of this idea).

This song has always been a little awkward in the Sacred Harp, because it was set in that book to verses from Isaac Watts' long-metre rendition of Psalm 107, originally about the coming of the Israelites to Canaan but in the southern US context sounding really rather like they were about manifest destiny ("Where nothing dwelt but beast of prey/or men as fierce and wild as they" yikes). The 2025 edition replaced these words with "Jesus shall reign where-e'er the sun", but I prefer the words are set to it in the Shenandoah Harmony, which will be familiar to singers already.

This tune comes from that set of Sacred Harp tunes that got dropped from the Denson revision sometime after 1911 but remained in the Cooper book (378b), as the singers of Hoboken Georgia still held onto it in a slightly mutated form, and that's how it ended up in the Shenandoah Harmony (326t). Curiously, the words the Hoboken singers attached to it (which aren't the words attached to it in any Sacred Harp edition) made an appearance in the 1904 edition of the Anglican Hymns Ancient and Modern (of all things), which itself was a disaster of an edition for many reasons, and they've not appeared in an Anglican hymnal before or since. I'm here singing all the verses that appear in that edition (pictured below from my dad's copy), so be warned it is a long one.

Like many Brits, I'm a sucker for versifications of Psalm 23, because of all of the shepherding that dominates a sizeable part of Britain's rural economy. This one's got a pretty unique set of words that don't seem to be too common, especially in the UK, but it works well with the strong sense of momentum in T.B. McGraw's music; you'd never have thought music constructed almost entirely out of arpeggios would have such life to it.

I don't think I'm going to be posting every day, but here's something to help with that (haha). I think this was one of the first songs to bring to my attention the dissonant potential of the Sacred Harp, with that chord change from the move to while just completely shifting the vibe, especially with a large singing class to get the full resonance. Also sadly missing from this recording, because of my click-track based production process, is the (unwritten) pause on the second note of the penultimate bar, which given that it's also the highest not in the song really serves as a well-placed climax.

Kicking things off here with a bit of a bang. Those who sing regularly from the Shenandoah Harmony or perhaps the Northern Harmony are probably more familiar with the Jeremiah Ingalls tune (ShH 254) of the same name ('The trumpet sounds, hell trembles, heaven rejoices/Lift up ye saints with cheeeerful voices!'), but I'd argue this one (ShH 282) is the more musically interesting of the two. Shumway doesn't quite get enough love I reckon, despite 192 Schenectady and 217 Ballstown in the Sacred Harp being both popular and bangers.