Leland Bryant Ross
This topic immediately struck me as one I needed to write on when, in late July of 2024, Teresa Holman posted in the Hymns of the Christian Life Facebook group a post she'd put up on her own page a year earlier, consisting of a video of her playing the hymn tune WELLESLEY, plus the text of the hymn "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" plus a hymnal page showing the music, for those who'd like to sing along. Several of the early commenters on her post mentioned that they "knew it to a different tune" or the like. This often happens when people of different ages, from different countries and different denominational backgrounds, meet to share hymns. We all tend to assume that if we know a hymn well and have heard it all our lives, the tune we know it to is the tune to that hymn. But we soon discover, if we are paying attention, that this is often not the case. A hymn may be extremely well known in our local version of the Family of God, but be completely unknown somewhere else. Some pairings of texts and tunes are indeed pretty much universal. Silent Night, for example, is almost always sung to the tune, STILLE NACHT, that it was set to the night it debuted in 1818. And yet 26 hymnals in database set it to this tune ("NATIVITY (Barnby"). This is similar to the situation with regard to pairing "Holy! Holy! Holy! Lord God Almighty!" with NICAEAAnd some are not universal, but close enough to it that even people who know a hymn to a different tune also recognize the main one; for example, NICAEA is the pretty-much universal tune for "Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!" Hardly anybody sang John Newton's "Faith's Review and Expectation" to anything but NEW BRITAIN twenty years ago, er, ahem, I mean hardly anybody sang "Amazing Grace" to anything but "Amazing Grace" twenty years ago, but that was far from true a hundred years ago, and now in this new time of "being church" a lot of folks are singing it (or listening to it sung up front) to a revised and expanded text and tune by Chris Tomlin called "My Chains Are Gone"; and back in around 1970 I first learned that hymn to HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN... But some tune pairings are very much a product not only of their times but also of their places and of the company they keep. For example, most American's can't imagine singing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" to its original tune, called ST. LOUIS (okay, okay, that's not the original we all sing, that's Chris Tomlin again, dead set on adding a refrain to everything); but in Britain few know that tune at all, and most sing it to FOREST GREEN, a pairing introduced in the 1906 edition of the English Hymnal, and there are other options (e.g. or ~«e.g.»~). Within the United States, the denomination you were raised in is likely to have dictated the tune you know some hymns to, for example, "Love divine, all loves excelling", which I've written about tunes for before. If you're a Baptist you probably sing it to BEECHER, whereas if you're a Lutheran you're likely to know it to JEFFERSON or something else, and many denominations sing it to HYFRYDOL. In doing the research for this article, I was surprised indeed to discover that BEECHER, which for me is very much linked to "Love Divine", is the tune the Episcopalians have sung "There's a Wideness" to for over a century now, a pairing which would never have occurred to me until I found it here.
1 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.
2 There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior,
there is healing in his blood.
3 But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.
4 For the love of God is broader
than the measures of man’s mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
5. There is plentiful redemption
In the blood that has been shed
There is joy for all the members
In the sorrows of the Head.
6. Pining souls, come nearer Jesus
And, oh, come not doubting thus
But with faith that trusts more bravely
His vast tenderness for us.
7 If our love were but more simple,
we should rest upon God’s Word,
and our lives would be illumined
by the presence of our Lord.
In 1854, Frederick W. Faber published a poem/hymn that began "Sons of hen, why will ye scatter"; what we now know as the hymn beginning "
- 23 instances of WELLESLEY (8 NON, 0 RCC)
- 7 instances of CROSS OF JESUS (NNA)
- 3 instances of CORVEDALE COE
- 3 instances of ST. HELENA (2 LUT)
- 2 instances of ALL FOR JESUS
- 2 instances of BEECHER
- 2 instances of DAILY DAILY (COE)
- 2 instances of GOTT WILL'S MACHEN (2 CAN)
- 1 instance of CHARLESTON UUA
- 1 instance of CIVILITY CRC
- 1 instance of IN MEMORIAM NZN
- 1 instance of LORD REVIVE US
- 1 instance of RIPLEY
- 1 instance of TREGURTHA
... and then there are 7 other tunes that were used with some frequency before 1979 but not since at least in the indexed hymnals, and 1 tune that I just set it to about a week ago:
- 94 HE IS CALLING (Vail)
- 20 ERIE (Converse)
- 14 WILMOT
- 10 ARMSTRONG
- 4 GALILEE (Jude)
- 4 RATHBUN
- 4 STOCKWELL
and
- 1 RETURN AGAIN