Heaven Playlist 6--Another well-rounded selection
Another group of songs to reflect a wide range of genres. The first is:
"How Beautiful Heaven Must Be" or We Read of a Place That's Called Heaven. The version I love is by George Jones. George Jones, "The Possum," for you non-country lovers (of which group I used to belong) is possibly (if such a thing can be decided) the greatest country singer of all time. Oh, how I hated him as a child and teen. Now I know better! Two of his greatest hits are, and you should definitely listen to both—your education is not complete unless you know these—"He Stopped Loving Her Today" and "She Thinks I Still Care."
News flash!! Miriam and I hosted a singing at my house Saturday afternoon—I'm really finally just up and about after it as it took all my energy from me, but it was the most fun I've had in ages. Absolutely satisfying in so many ways. We plan to keep doing this. I'll write more about our plan (not that we have one) later, but what was so weird was how many songs we sang that I have already written about in my Heaven Playlist series or have queued up ready to write about. And I did not plan that at all. I found a new Watersons' song to add to my playlist which is super and it just reinforced my view that these songs I'm writing about are often ones that all kinds of people, religious or not, can love to sing.
Back to "How Beautiful Heaven Must Be." This song, by Mrs. A. S. Bridgewater (otherwise known as Cordie), was published in church hymnals, gospel songbooks, camp meeting books, gospel quartet songs and you name it. So far it is the only song by Cordie listed in Hymnary.org. We don't seem to know anything about the composer, A. P. Bland (well, you could make an easy pun about that!). You can see on YouTube it was covered by a number of country and bluegrass stars, as well as some gospel groups. Anyway, for me the tune is lovely and I love the little slowdown and fermata at the end of the line, "Fair haven of rest for the weary." It's got a lot of the usual jewels and crowns of gold type language, but I love the line
In heaven no drooping nor pining,no wishing for elsewhere to be.
Drooping and pining is just so expressive! And in George Jones' voice. It's too bad we have no more hymns or gospel songs by Bridgewater and Bland.
This choice will likely call me out as a Tulsa girl. It's Leon Russell's "Jesus Will Take Me Home." When Leon died about a year and a half ago (November 2016), I was watching various videos I could find of his memorial services and earlier live performances and such. So many people have never heard of Leon Russell, yet he wrote some of the biggest hits ever and people like Elton John hailed him as his biggest influence. You can read quite a bit about his career on Wikipedia; you will likely be astonished by how many superstars he played with and the stars who covered his songs. Anyway, while I dithered around for hours and hours (over several days) celebrating his life and grieving by watching videos, I happened on "Jesus Will Take Me Home." I had just completely missed out ever hearing that one, or if I did, I wasn't interested at the time. He recorded this with New Grass Revival on the Live and Pickling Fast (isn't that a great title) CD. In the darkest hour, of the blackest night,something’s wrong and nothing’s right.And the hurt’s so strong, and the night’s so long,I hear the silence everywhere.But Jesus will take me home, Jesus will take me home.
Leon has such a soulful voice and you can just here prayerfulness in this one. Over the years, he wrote and sang several 'religiousy' songs; his music has often been described with words like 'churchy,' 'gospel,' 'revivalist,' and more. His piano style was quite often very gospel-influenced, especially with gospel style chord progressions and big chunky chords. (When I say gospel, I tend to mean white, Southern gospel, not black gospel—though there is a close alliance between the two, they are also quite different.) He had this drawling way of holding on to words after a chord changed making it seem even more drawling. Well, he was or seems to me to have been intensely private about his personal life, especially in the later years, and he didn't seem to have talked about his own beliefs (at least not to reporters and the like), but he projected an air of being a believer in the intensity with which he sang such songs. He also did a video of the gospel song, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," as a farewell to a good friend. This recording displays the gospel style of his playing a bit more overtly and makes me grow to like a song I very much disliked as a child! (Also, I had completely forgotten this for the moment, but Leon covered George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" in his guise as Hank Wilson.)
O the Deep Deep Love. This hymn written by S. Trevor Francis, a London merchant who died in 1925, depicts the love of Jesus as a "mighty ocean," "vast, unmeasured, boundless, free." We are told that this ocean, the current of Jesus' love, is "leading onward, leading homeward to my glorious rest above." It does seem somewhat incongruous that the two main images in the hymn are of our rest in heaven and Jesus' love as an ocean—I don't think of the ocean as being particularly restful, at least not when we are being carried in its current.
The tune I know it with is EBENEZER (TON-Y-BOTEL), a Welsh hymn tune. It's also sometimes set to BUNESSAN, more well-known as the tune for "Morning Has Broken," but I haven't ever heard it set to that and don't particularly care to! There are several good versions of this from church music projects. Maybe someone can help me here? I'm not sure of a good term for what I'm calling 'church music projects.' There seem to be churches with good music putting out CDs of hymns slightly modernized to appeal to, I suspect, younger audiences. They often feature bluegrass instruments, rather than organs or pianos, and they may or may not have new hymn tunes. Personally I like the ones that are a bit freshened up with new instrumentation and maybe a bit of different harmony, but keep the melody as is. Although I say that realizing that the version I put on my playlist of O the Deep Deep Love is actually a pared-down melody. The Welsh hymn tune is stripped of much of its slightly ornamented with triplets style into more straight quarter notes. AND it's not by a 'church music project,' but by a husband/wife bluegrass/acoustic band called by The Blackthorn Project. It reminds me of another version that is by a 'church music project' called Enfield Hymn Sessions. I like it too.
The setting I sing it to is by William Billings, the father of American choral music. Billings was a singing school teacher and composer of hymn tunes, writing in the late 1700s. He died, penniless, leaving his wife and a number of children in the care of others. I'm remarking on this because of news of this very week about composers and writers of music speaking before Congress about copyright laws. Anyone who knows me (as a librarian), knows I'm not an advocate of our current copyright laws, though I don't think songwriters are being paid fairly currently, but the situation for folks like Billings was atrocious. His music went into hymnbooks and other works and were permanently out of copyright almost before they could be copyrighted. I don't think songwriters—the creators of music—should be left penniless and ready for the workhouse. Let's please find a happy medium of making sure everyone is fairly compensated, yet not keep things in copyright so long as to hamper creativity in the long run! OK, off my bandstand!
Billings work almost went completely out of fashion, but its inclusion in Sacred Harp singing has made it important once again as more people (including me) become interested in the Sacred Harp tradition. I don't think I wrote about Sacred Harp yet? I need to make myself a list of all the topics that go along with these posts that I say I will write about and do it!! Anyway, my Sacred Harp songbook, The Sacred Harp, 1991 Edition, has five tunes for various bits of "Land of Pure Delight." My favorite in it is Billings' tune, JORDAN, as well. Please read ALL the words of this lovely hymn which I've provided in the illustration for you. The version I listen to is on by Paul Hillier and His Majestie's Clerkes. Watts seems to be rather confused about whether Jordan was a sea, stream, or river, but nevertheless, I hope I am not a 'timorous mortal,' 'shivering on the brink.' I don't think I will be—I can think of two lines in sacred music that absolutely grip me every time I hear them. One is in the contemporary song by Richie Mullins, "Sometimes by Step" (which I am struggling to fit into my playlist since I love it so much) where he says,
Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me.
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