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Melody Layton McMahon, December 25, 1957 to December 13, 2021

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Melody Layton McMahon, 63, passed away at Clarehouse in Tulsa on December 13, 2021. She was born on December 25, 1957 in Tulsa to Conrad and Beverly (Roberson) Layton. She married husband Michael (Mike) McMahon in Tulsa in 1982. She inspired a lifelong love of learning in her children Maeve McMahon (Ardern Hulme-Beaman) of Liverpool, UK and Niall McMahon (Lauren) of Washington, DC. She was also the doting grandmother to Winston, Niall and Lauren’s Shetland sheepdog. Melody attended Berryhill School in Tulsa before attending the University of Oklahoma where she was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music. She then attended Columbia University in New York, NY where she attained a Masters of Science in Library Service. She later completed a Masters of Art in Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary in Cleveland, OH. Her career in librarianship spanned the fields of music, general academic studies and, most importantly, theological librarianship. She worked at The Juilliard School (New Y
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Heaven Playlist 9, and complete Playlist

[Editor's note: This is the last in the series of Melody's Heaven Playlists. Melody died on 13 December 2021. Her complete playlist, including many songs she did not get a chance to write about can be found at the bottom of this post. She chose That Glad Reunion Day for her memorial service and to remain as the header image for this blog.] Heaven Playlist 9—Hillary Scott and friends It was our lucky day when Lady A (formerly known as Lady Antebellum), the hugely popular country trio, took a hiatus and worked on their own projects. From Hillary Scott, the woman in the trio, came a wonderful CD of Christian songs. The online site of the Tennessean published a story titled, “Hillary Scott channels grief into gospel,” writing that she suffered a miscarriage and her sadness led her to her roots in Christianity. She had already started a CD with her family and had gotten the incomparable bluegrass artist and producer Ricky Skaggs to produce and sing on the CD. Several have some conn
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I Want to be a Librarian in Heaven, or, Heaven in Angela Thirkell’s Barsetshire

[Editor's note: Melody wrote this while on sabbatical. She was editing this until weeks before her death. I am still adding in citations and footnotes (8 Feb 2022). Any errors should be assumed to be the fault of the editor converting footnotes to in-text citations, and not Melody's.]
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Heaven Playlist 8, and update

[Editor's note: Melody wrote this post in January 2021.] Update: Well, who knew? I didn't. Crossing the Bar--while trying to find a good version of the Kontakion for the Departed, or, Give Rest, O Christ (I've referred to this in my post about my edited book, Never Enough Singing being made into an open access online book), I ran across a setting of Crossing the Bar by the British musician, Sir Hubert Parry who lived from 1848-1918. He wrote a lot of choral music and quite a bit of it is in various English hymnals; Crossing the Bar was included in Hymns Ancient and Modern (Angela Thirkell, see my post Angela Thirkell as Hymnologist , calls it "our" hymn-book, and says of it, "and  Hymns Ancient and Modern  were used, from a reasonable-sized book, without the additions that have more than all the demerits of the older hymns and none of their warm familiarity") in 1868, being called Sunset and Evening Star (choir of Jesus College Cambridge singing). La
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Angela Thirkell as Hymnologist - Not That She Was Any Such Thing

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Editor's note: Melody wrote this blog post in January 2021. The British middle-brow fiction writer of the pre- through post-war periods in England was, of course, NOT a hymnologist. I became interested in Angela Thirkell’s writing on hymns and hymn singing as I’ve been researching for a scholarly article on her eschatology, and of course, she was not a theologian either! However, both topics of great interest to me are written about throughout the entirety of her Barsetshire novel series , nearly thirty novels, one per year. For those of you who are not aware of Angela Thirkell’s writing—she is taking a beating from many online commentators and some academic writers for her conservative views. I am certainly no conservative and many of the views she espouses are abhorrent to me. However, I feel if one only read novels whose writers one never found a disagreement with, that it would be almost unsustainable to maintain interest. For me, it is only her acerbic wit which makes it possi
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My Blog Has No Longer Ceased!

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Any follower of my blog knows I come and go. Well, since my last post in July 2018, I have been in hospital 12 or 13 times, usually for 5-6 days at a time. Just one thing after another. I don’t believe you can withstand cancer for nearly 40 years without a bunch of other stuff going wrong and indeed, it is the effects of the cancer causing most of my problems. Now, we are stuck in shelter-in-place in most parts of the world due to COVID-19. I’m hoping to use this enforced period of self-isolation to write some more and edit more of my dad’s stories. I have also had a couple more books that were accepted in the Paul Bechtold Library Publications project before I had to resign to long-term disability, and everything else has had to wait on me getting those finished. I’m sure I wrote about the books we were publishing elsewhere, but the last two books in the project are awesome and I want to comment on them. The penultimate book is titled  Hattie’s Book: A Woman’s Story in the City,
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An Aside: Night Visiting Songs: (Subgenre) Ghosts

About a year ago I started to have some interest in "night visiting songs." This was inspired by my growing admiration for the work of Jim Moray, an English folk-singer, and of course, my love for the saddest songs possible and songs of this genre are pretty uniformly very sad. Moray has recorded a couple of night visiting songs he wrote, "Nightvisiting" and "Nightvisitor," plus he covered Bella Hardy's beautiful "Three Black Feathers," along with a couple of other trad songs which I may or may not talk about in this post. (For links to performances of these songs, see the list at the bottom.) Well then, a few weeks ago when Miriam and I were hosting a singing at my house , I sang the lovely really sad folk song, "She Moved Through the Fair." It had never occurred to me this was a night visiting song, but it hit Miriam and about the same second as I was singing that it was. I used to sing this song to the kids when they were
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