Melody's Blog

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

[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

[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.]

[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

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