I gather the Sacred Harp music that Marty Haugen used for this song was meant to be sung unaccompanied. (… or did he take the words and write new music?) This may explain my difficulty in constructing a backing that doesn’t cause me to cringe. I have heard it played like an Irish ballad on piano at a mass once in Port Stephens, which was nice, but usually it tends to become stodgy when it should be light. I once made a MIDI file by inserting every note I could find as I just couldn’t get BIAB to do anything with the 3/2 timing and the result was predictably unlistenable.
The text is available here.
These schoolboys have an interesting take on it and you can hear a minute of the original here. My backing is still rather disappointing. Don’t forget the key change at the fourth verse and the dynamics – the verses are soft/loud/soft/soft/loud. Lastly, I play it capo 3 to save my poor fingers, at least until the key change.
It’s the tune, BEACH SPRING, that is from Sacred Harp, while Marty Haugen wrote these words. I keep meaning to look for older hymns set to the tune, but haven’t done so yet.
My parish in NZ used this for evening prayer: at our best, we did verse 1 unaccompanied, v2 with only a drumbeat, v3 drum + violin, then v4 onwards the full music group
Thanks for clearing that up, Mary. I think I’ll try it with less instrumentation next time, as you have suggested.
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