It Is a Small (Musical) World

Thank goodness the wind finally stopped. There was no wind in town yesterday, but up here, it blew until the sun went down. We are supposed to get rain for the next couple of days, which is perfectly fine with me. We need it.

I dropped off cowpea seedlings at Cathy’s yesterday and got to see the baby calves and chat with her for a bit. Cathy also sings and plays the piano and has a great interest in hymns and hymn history. She pulled out a hymnal I haven’t seen before. I have an extensive collection but I don’t have everything. Cathy grew up in the Baptist faith, although she often attends our Mennonite church here. The hymnal that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship uses is this one:

I sat down at her lovely Chickering baby grand with this book and played a version of O Love That Will Not Let Me Go that I’ve never heard before. The traditional tune for that song is "St. Margaret,” and as a church pianist, I have to say that it ranks right up near the top of the list of songs I hate to play.

[Other songs on that list include Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy, and Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. In short, any songs with weird intervals and/or what I like to refer to as “gratuitous accidentals” get put on that list. Also on that list is just about anything by Marty Haugen, who is a well-known Lutheran composer—the Lutheran church I play for did his Holden Evening Prayer one year, which includes a song written in E-flat minor with six flats. Five flats is not hard, but remembering that C is also flat in the key of E-flat minor requires serious concentration.]

Anyway, this hymnal includes O Love That Will Not Let Me Go set to a different—and quite beautiful—tune called “Donna.” I would be sorely tempted to paste that version over the version in our hymnal.

Cathy showed me another song she really likes from that hymnal. She said, “This is a Lutheran one,” and I said, “Oh, I probably know it.” As it turns out, I didn’t. It’s a Christmas song called Where Shepherds Lately Knelt. I played through it once and then looked at the bottom of the page where the tune name and hymn text information appear, and was delighted to find out that the words were written by Jaroslav Vajda.

I might need my mother to pop in here with additional information or clarification, but Jaroslav Vajda was born in 1919 in Lorain, Ohio, where my family is from. His father was a Lutheran minister and may have been minister of the church I grew up in (?), but in any case, I remember hearing that Jaroslav Vajda was connected to our congregation. He was a prolific hymnist and wrote over 200 original and translated hymns. One of his most well-known hymns is Go, My Children, With My Blessing, which is set to the tune “Ar Hyd Y Nos” and appears in the Mennonite hymnal.

Who knew?

I came home and immediately ordered a copy of the Celebrating Grace hymnal and also found a lovely choir arrangement of Where Shepherds Lately Knelt, so we might be doing that at Christmas this year.

I have to say, the Baptists really do have church music dialed in. Catherine, who was our church pianist for many years, came from a Baptist background and taught me most of what I know about being a church pianist. I am eager to see what else is in this Baptist hymnal. The arrangements appear to be very singable and without the goofy chord substitutions found in the some of the Lutheran hymnals.