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Ear worm in three.. two… one….

As an American growing up in the 1970s, I learned this in elementary school, and I associated it with Vietnam War protests. This might even have been the first African American spiritual I learned, and I didn’t even know at the time it was one. In fact, I don’t know if I knew until well into adulthood, because to me it was a protest folk song, and in my mind, I hear Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, & Mary.

What I know is that is history is long, and it wasn’t always just an anti-war song, but rather a song about baptism and freedom – going to glory and from slavery, and to a place where fighting (literally and metaphorically) ceases – “gonna study war no more” is likely a reference to this passage in Isaiah (2:4):

“He shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning-hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.

How the whole song came to be, and how it was used, and its journey to our current view of it…. well, like many songs handed down in oral tradition, the path and the ‘real story’ is murky and may never really be known. What we do know is its powerful imagery was inspired by the plight of those who had gone before, and continues to inspire those who go on.

Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
down by the riverside,
down by the riverside,
down by the riverside.
Gonna lay down my sword and shield,
down by the riverside,
gonna study war no more.

(Chorus)
I ain’t gonna study war no more,
I ain’t gonna study war no more,
ain’t gonna study war no more. (2x)

Gonna lay down my burden
down by the riverside …

(Chorus)

Gonna shake hands around the world,
ev’rywhere I roam …

(Chorus)

May it be so for all of us.

—-

Yep, that picture is of the River Jordan.

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Remember when I was eyeballs deep in those aspirational hymns in the In Time To Come section? And how wearing, given our current political crisis, I found them?

Yeah. Here we are again. I am worn out by these hymns, barreling down, calling us over and over and over again to remain hopeful and energized. I am feeling quite unhopeful and exhausted right now. And may I say, Dear Spiritual Practice, I don’t need you reminding me of what I know already.

Sigh.

I also know that what I am doing is not normal, and we don’t just sing through the hymnal like this. My experience is not a typical experience.

For people approaching this hymn in a typical manner, flipping through hymns known and unknown seeking a couple of songs of inspiration and vision, this one will certainly fit the bill. Odell Shepard’s lyrics remind us of our aspirations and calls us to remember what it’s all about. (Plus, the tune’s a familiar one from the Southern Harmony collection.)

Peace! The perfect word is sounding, like a universal hymn
under oceans, over mountains, to the world’s remotest rim.

Toiling centuries have struggled upward on a stony way
just to set the torch of freedom where it flames aloft today.

All the old forlorn lost causes, every fair forbidden dream,
and the prophet’s hopeless vision, and the poet’s fitting gleam,

All the hopes of subject peoples, all the dreams of the oppressed,
must be ours, our hopes, our visions. We can never stay or rest.

Good, solid lyrics, hopeful, aspirational. The right hymn, I am sure, for many occasions, which could be well paired with any of the other Peace or In Time to Come or even Freedom songs.

Just don’t try to sing them all, all at once.

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The picture? Oh, that’s a peace plant. 🙂

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This hymn, y’all.

First – we’re already into the Peace section; Labor and Learning was short, sweet, and to the point.

Second – I am not Finnish. Nowhere in my family’s known genealogy is there any Scandinavian blood; we’re all German and English, with a dollop of Dutch and a dash of Irish. Yet this tune, from a longer symphonic piece by Finnish composer Jean Sebelius and considered if not the national anthem then at least Finland’s most important song, makes me weep from its beauty and connection to the ineffable.

In our hymnal, this tune appears twice – with these lyrics, by Lloyd Stone, written as a prayer of peace – and later in our journey as We Would Be One. And every time we use it, whichever lyrics we use, I am literally moved to tears. Because not only does the tune reach something deep in our souls, the lyrics reach something deep in our hearts: the call of peace, the call of humanity.

I sometimes think of this lyric as the First Principle on the national/global level. If we affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, we must also affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every nationality – with the important caveat, of course, that governments regularly deny and oppress and stir up nationalistic jingoism in egotistical shows of empty bravado. (I’m lookin’ at you, 45.)

But this… this is the vision, the prayer, the call for peace.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Amen.

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I’m a little more in love with this hymn today than I was yesterday.

I’ve used it several times – often with services about the arts or knowledge and reason. But even then, I don’t know that I actually meditated on the lyrics, written by Thomas Troeger, now a professor of preaching at Yale (officially the J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication – isn’t that a helluva metaphor for preaching?).

But I digress.

The reason I love this hymn a little more is that Troeger’s lyrics rather described my personal theology, which is most decidedly a Universalist process theology. The lyric never defines what the “source of faith and learning” is, but instead invite us to consider the wonder of creation and the act of creating as connected to some source within and beyond us. The lyrics command us to learn and explore and create, and never lose a sense of wonder. And they implore us to use our reason and faith-led, ethical, humanist core to carry out justice and compassion, and to reject things that do not aid in the growth and nurturance of this world.

Just look at these words:

Praise the source of faith and learning that has sparked and stoked the mind
with a passion for discerning how the world has been designed.
Let the sense of wonder flowing from the wonders we survey
keep our faith forever growing and renew our need to pray.

Source of wisdom, we acknowledge that our science and our art
and the breadth of human knowledge only partial truth impart.
Far beyond our calculation lies a depth we cannot sound
where the purpose for creation and the pulse of life are found.

May our faith redeem the blunder of believing that our thought
has displaced the grounds for wonder which the ancient prophets taught.
May our learning curb the error which unthinking faith can breed
lest we justify some terror with an antiquated creed.

Praise for minds to probe the heavens, praise for strength to breathe the air.
Praise for all that beauty leavens, praise for silence, music, prayer.
Praise for justice and compassion and for strangers, neighbors, friends.
Praise for hearts and lips to fashion praise for love that never ends.

I am weak.

(Also – while the tune has a decidedly Irish lilt, it was a commission, written for the 125th anniversary celebration of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Well met.)

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Image is of the seven wonders of the ‘modern’ world.

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If it seemed like I phoned it in a bit the last few days, well, you’re not wrong. The truth is, I could blame it on being sick, but mostly I blame it on my personal fears that I wouldn’t treat the freedom songs from the African American spirituals tradition well – and in fact I may have been unclear or hurtful more than once in my efforts to seek balance and information. For all this, I apologize.

What I won’t apologize for, however, is a sense of pride in myself that despite the horrible sinus headaches and annoying coughs, I have kept this up. Much like those hard weeks after the election, I felt a sense of commitment to myself and the process. And that matters. (Now if I could only feel the same sense of commitment to exercise…)

Anyway… we’re on to the Labor and Learning hymns, beginning with this iconic song of the labor movement. In learning more about the song, I ran across an interview with singer-songwriter John McCutcheon, who spoke of his admiration of this song, which is

able to say everything you need to say in four lines. I tried to write verses for it and they were just pointless. … They can’t be improved. It was like a perfect distillation of the sentiment of the song. … the way it talks about the basic, the most basic things about communities and unions, and … it’s just a perfect song as a piece of craft work.

The song, like most folk music, has its own stories, with various sources claiming various origins. In his songbook Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Pete Seeger says this:

Waldemar Hille, editing the People’s Songs bulletin in 1948, once showed me two short verses he found when researching U.S. labor history:

Step by step the longest march can be won, can be won.
Many stones can form an arch, singly none, singly none.
And by union, what we will can be accomplished still;
drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.

It was printed in the preamble to the constitution of an early coal miner’s union. Says Wally, “good verse.” Says I, “What’s the tune?”

“I don’t know,” says Wally, “I suppose some old Irish tune might fit it. Like the song from the Irish famine of the 1840’s, ‘The Praties they Grow Small.’”

“Let’s try it,” says I. It fit. And has been sung to that melody ever since.

And so this is the melody we sing. Two simple, compact, complete couplets – a perfect introduction to this section, and a good section to be starting on this day after the International Women’s Day general strike, A Day Without a Woman. There will be more space to talk about women and the labor movement in upcoming songs… so I’ll save my energy for those.

For now, I leave you with this wonderful, short, meaningful song. I’m glad we sing it.

 

 

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This is a great piece – best sung a capella, with three strong song leaders to help fill in the rich harmony.

I often forget about it, this sweet song written by cantor Linda Hirschhorn, and I’m not sure why. So when it comes up in conversation or I hear a snippet of it, I go ‘oh yeah, that’s a good song.’ And then promptly forget it again.

I don’t have much more to add today – still fighting off the crud. But I like it and I wish we sang it more… it’s a beautiful sung prayer. You can hear it here, courtesy of the Church of the Larger Fellowship and the Oakland Chancel Choir:

Circle ‘round for freedom, circle ‘round for peace,
for all of us imprisoned, circle for release,
circle for the planet, circle for each soul,
for the children of our children, keep the circle whole.

Amen.

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Today’s post will be very short, as I have succumbed finally to the respiratory crud going around. But I do have a thing or two to say about this song, which I could not sing, physically or emotionally.

First, I am glad we have a chance to see some of the less cheerful, less hopeful spirituals – this more than any other song that I’ve encountered shows the realities and cruelty of slavery, and the sadness of all who died because of it.

But also, this is more evidence that the hymnal isn’t a book of songs to sing, it is a collection of music that speaks to our living tradition, some of which are preserved (I suspect) for historical purposes. This song speaks to the dark realities of slavery, which some Unitarians and Universalists fought against and some Unitarians and Universalists fought for. Ours is an ugly and complicated history around slavery, colonization, and race relations.

This song sits in our hymnal as a stark reminder.

No more auction block for me. No more, no more.
No more auction block for me, many thousand gone.

No more driver’s lash for me. No more, no more.
No more driver’s lash for me, many thousand gone.

No more peck of corn for me. No more, no more.
No more peck of corn for me, many thousand gone.

No more pint of salt for me. No more, no more.
No more pint of salt for me, many thousand gone.

But for god’s sake, unless you have a very particular context and very particular performers, don’t sing this. Let it speak without singing.

—

Illustration from Harper’s Weekly, July 1861.

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Oh the things you learn when you challenge your assumptions…

In late January, I co-led an interfaith service focused on resistance, which featured the support of the local AME Zion choir; thus, while music came from several sources, we did lean heavily on the gospel genre, and we chose this song as our sending call. I was surprised to hear the choir sing “stayed on Jesus” – because I had only ever heard “freedom” and I thought “huh” – I guess this is their adaptation of this spiritual to fit their religious needs. I was, in fact, pretty certain that the lyric was changed TO Jesus at some point.

When I opened the hymnal today, I again read “Words and Music: African American spiritual (1750-1875). Assumption confirmed.

Or not.

Even as I sang this, seeing it as a powerful song speaking to the call of freedom and justice through the ages, I wondered about that Jesus line. So… I trotted over to the internet, and discovered this: “Reverend Osby of Aurora, Illinois created this revamp of an old gospel song ‘I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus’ while spending time in Hinds County jail during the freedom rides.”

It was then spread and became a signature song of the civil rights movement (you can read more in Pete Seeger’s book Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures).

And so, while it might have roots as a spiritual (I can’t find anything to confirm or deny this at 8:15 on a Sunday morning), it is – as we have it today – a song of the civil rights movement.

Oh, I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.
Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom,
Hallelu, Hallelu, Halleluia.

I was walking and talking with my mind …

I was singing and praying with my mind …

Oh, I woke up this morning with my mind …

And it’s a song we need today, because we are fighting the same fights and we can’t ever forget.

—

The image is of the Freedom Singers at a 1963 event.

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I think I know why white people don’t sing this song well.

I may be late to the party on this, but it dawned on me as I was singing: we don’t know what it’s like to NOT be free.

Sure, we get close if we’re female, or queer, or live with a disability, or trans. We know the hard, scary restrictions and compromises to our rights. But if we’re one or more of those things and we’re white, we get a pass. Because we don’t have, in our living memory, a deep, soul-rooted knowledge of what it means to be in chains. We just don’t.

We white people can sing this all day long, and groove to versions of this song by John Legend and the Roots, and Nina Simone, and Natalie Cole (who sang it at the White House in 2010), or even the original, by NYC jazzman Billy Taylor – but the truth is, we can only listen to the deep, soul-rooted longing of the African Americans for whom this is reality.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.
I wish I could break all these chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things I could say,
Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear for the whole world to hear.
Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear for the whole world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love in my heart,
remove all the bars that still keep us apart.
I wish you could know what it means to be me,
then you’d see and agree everyone should be free.
Then you’d see, and agree everyone should be free.

I wish I could give all I’m longing to give.
I wish I could live like I’m longing to live.
I wish I could do all the things I can do,
though I’m way overdue I’d be starting anew.
Though I’m way overdue I’d be starting anew.

I wish I could be like a bird in the sky.
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly.
I’d soar to the sun and look down at the sea,
then I’d sing ‘cause I’d know how it feels to be free.
Then I’d sing ‘cause I’d know how it feels to be free.

For what it’s worth, I love the song, and I have sung it with gusto, because in my heart of hearts, I wish everyone could be free. But I can’t sing it the way it’s meant to be sung, because I can’t pretend for a second that I understand the longing in my deep, soul-root.

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Picture of Billy Taylor, composer of this song.

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Oof.

This is a complex lyric – three verses of a complex poem, “Stanzas on Freedom,” written by James Russell Lowell (one of the 19th century American Fireside Poets). It’s not even a terribly good poem – technically, his writing was good, but as Margaret Fuller wrote, “”his verse is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not remember him.”

And it’s a complex topic – slavery. What’s worse is that Lowell’s anti-slavery position came largely because his wife wore him down; many of his thoughts about race make my skin crawl; I can’t even bear to repeat it here – if you’re curious, check out his Wikipedia page, under “Beliefs.”

The truth is, I don’t want to dig any deeper into this history and make a justification about why this should or shouldn’t be in our hymnal, or why it should or shouldn’t matter what a person’s belief is and we should honor the art, and what are the lines we draw between sacred and profane. Largely, because, I don’t know if I have the knowledge or the life experience or even the right to say if this is an appropriate and helpful hymn. And I do not want to mess it up.

What I do know is that it’s not a terribly familiar tune, nor is it as intuitive as I’d hoped, so I really struggled to sing it and pay attention to the lyrics all at once. And if I couldn’t manage it, how can our congregations? These are not casual lyrics – there’s something really complex, possibly meaningful and possibly terrible, about them.

All whose boast it is that we come of forebears brave and free,
if there breathe on earth a slave, are we truly free and brave?
If we do not feel the chain when it works another’s pain,
are we not base slaves indeed, slaves unwilling to be freed?

Is true freedom but to break fetters for our own dear sake,
and with leathern hearts forget we owe humankind a debt?
No, true freedom is to share all the chains that others wear,
and, with heart and hand, to be earnest to make others free.

They are slaves who fear to speak for the fallen and the weak;
they are slaves who will not choose hatred, scoffing, and abuse,
rather than in silence shrink from the truth they needs must think.
They are slaves who dare not be in the right with two or three.

Oof. Opinions, comments, history, and perspectives welcome.

—

Photo courtesy of  Internet Archive Book Images – https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14595373847/
Source book page: https://archive.org/stream/historyprogresso09sand/historyprogresso09sand#page/n489/mode/1up,
No restrictions, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42034844