This song is a folk styled song from the sixties, and it sounds like it for good or ill. Happily, I love sixties folk music, but this is from before my time in the Catholic church and I was unfamiliar with it. It is by Carey Landry and Carol Jean Kinghorn-Landry, although the sheet music lists only his name. It is obviously for Pentecost but it is also a gathering song. It must have been high rotation in the USA in the past
The title reminds me of Stan Freberg’s “Elderly Man River” – dropping the “g” is authentic! (see 2:19 in the clip)
The text is here (scroll down).
OCP sell the sheet music.
My backing goes country on BIAB.
Talking about authentic – this is how it sounded in the sixties:
This is a later bland version by Landry.
Chris Brunelle re-injecting the Spirit:
Nice harmonies:
From a folk mass:
A full bore performance powered by MIDI:
This post has made me a happy man! When I started being involved with liturgical music I was drawn very strongly to the folk style of the NALR’s Glory & Praise series:
Carey Landry was a big part of that, and I have been hoping for a long time that someone would make his first album available and you’ve linked to it on YouTube, so thanks a lot! One small correction, though. He wasn’t involved with Carol Jean Kinghorn at the time this was written/recorded, so the OCP attribution is correct (also, Discogs has both sides of the album cover with credits on the back). As much as I love hearing this, it’s definitely past its use-by-date for liturgy!
Many thanks for the correction, Chris. On the OCP website there is attribution to both as songwriters but on the sheet music it is just to him. All rather odd but thanks for the explanation.
cheers
Geoff
I suspect that perhaps Landry has assigned co-ownership of the copyright to his wife. So the attribution is about ownership rather than authorship.