Thursday, April 30, 2015

"You Have Won The Victory" -- a Full Gospel Baptist Church anthem

I clicked on this powerful contemporary African American gospel choir anthem tonight on a Facebook page called Support for Erica DiGiovanna Trinh. It solicits prayers, donations and other support for one of my students at Springfield College in Illinois, who is fighting an aggressive brain tumor.

You Have Won The Victory/The Anthem - Full Gospel Baptist Church - Lyrics. Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship International Ministry of Worship - The Anthem/You Have Won The Victory - Lyrics from their 2013 album - One Sound

Information on the Full Gospel Baptist Church movement at http://www.fullgospelbaptist.org/.

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

"Danny Boy" -- links, lyrics and YouTube videos of a classic for Saturday's session at Clayville

Today's blast email to Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music and Prairieland Strings lists.

We've been looking for lead sheets and copyright-free dulcimer tablature for "Danny Boy" lately, and I think I've found something we can play (with the usual revisions and general noodling around) at our sessions. A version of Clapton's song chart and chords in D is available on line, along with other lead sheets and tablature. Here are links to:

As usual, we'll probably have to do a little adjusting to make the hot-off-the-internet arrangements work together.

A couple of YouTube Clips:

Eric Clapton -- finger-style acoustic guitar:

John McDermott, the Scottish-Canadian baritone -- a cappella:

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Swenska Mässan in Dillner's Melodierna till Swenska Kyrkans Psalmer

in Johan Dillner. Melodierna till Swenska Kyrkans Psalmer: Noterade med Ziffror, för Skolor och Menigheten. Stockholm, 1830. Google eBooks. (I have two more pages -- 199 and 200 -- saved with this one on a Microsoft Word document in my Dillner folder.)

For an English text of the Swedish revision of 1917, see The Mass in Sweden: Its Development from the Latin Rite from 1531 to 1917 by Eric Esskildsen Yelverton (London: Harrison and Sons, 1920), pp. 155ff. The Kyrie is at p. 159. Available in Google eBooks https://books.google.com/books?id=T09CAAAAIAAJ&dq.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

"Never Going Back Again" -- classic Fleetwood Mac song for acoustic guitar and (hopefully -- just maybe) mountain dulcimer?

D R A F T

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks - Never Going Back Again HD

One of several instructional videos on YouTube:

Never Going Back Again Guitar Lesson. Says Eric Branner, "Get tabs here under transcriptions. http://www.blackforrestmusic.com Check out my new book while you're there! This is a classic fleetwood mac finger pickin tune. Such a great song, and great practice for bringing out a syncopated rhythm. Let me know if you have any questions or requests!"

And another, in a brighter "Nashville tuning" that has a dulcimer-ish sound to it ...

Guitar tutorial: Nashville Tuning - Never going back. Kevin Fleming. "Learn how to finger pick Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood mac's song Never Going Back with this guitar tutorial. This song is played with an alternate tuning and a guitar strung in nashville tuning style." Song begins at 9:00.

Hat tip to one of my students, Gina Atterberry, who was listening posted a link to Facebook saying she was listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album. Which inspired me to track down the album and find the song. My copy of the CD was lost in the clutter in my basement.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

"Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" -- a bluegrass gospel song for this week's Prairieland Strings session

A month or two ago, Dan brought in some sheet music/dulcimer tab he found online for "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," a fine old gospel tune in the public domain. Written in 1887 by Anthony J. Showalter and Elisha Hoffman, it has become a bluegrass gospel standard. Let's play it at this week's "third Thursday" session of the Prairieland Strings, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson.


Don't forget the "Fake It Till You Make It" workshop on playing in jam sessions from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, April 18, in the barn at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop, Ill. 125, Pleasant Plains.


That tab that Dan brought us is available on the EverythingDulcimer.com website. Link here for a PDF file. If your computer is squirrelly about opening PDF documents, go to http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/, open the Tablature menu and scroll down the directory to "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." The tab you want is by Robert Sutton (and it's easy to find since his is the only tab for that title)!

If you don't recall what it sounds like, we can fix that right now. Here's a pretty good bluegrass version on YouTube. It features the East Tennessee State University Bluegrass Pride Band with guest vocalist Joshua Argo (an ETSU bluegrass student) at the Bluegrass On Broad festival in Kingsport, Tenn.

Notice how some of the group sing "Leaning on Jesus" in harmony while the others are just singing "Lean-ing" in the chorus. In our sheet music, the phrase is written as two half notes. I don't know how you'd write that harmony part in standard notation, but as long as the singers are listening to each other (which is crucial in bluegrass harmony), it all comes together.

"Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" has been around forever (well, at least since 1887), and it's been covered by artists ranging from Iris Dement, Twila Paris and the Gaithers to the Stanley Brothers, Chet Atkins, the Statler Brothers, George Jones, Andy Griffith, the Dillards, the Louvin Brothers, the Sons of the Pioneers, Al Green, Mahalia Jackson and the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. They're all on YouTube, along with many others.

The song works in a wide variety of musical styles. Here's Barry Wilson singing it in 2008 at Kansas City Baptist Temple:

And here's a clip from the 1943 movie "A Human Comedy," showing GIs singing it on a World War II troop train.

According to Wikipedia, Showalter thought of the melody and refrain when he was comforting two of his students whose wives had recently died. "When writing letters of consolation, Showalter was inspired by the phrase in the Book of Deuteronomy 33:27 "The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." He asked Hoffman to do the rest of the lyrics.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

"At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing"

OpenHymnal.org has sheet music http://openhymnal.org/Pdf/At_The_Lambs_High_Feast-Sonne_Der_Gerechtigkeit.pdf

At The Lamb's High Feast We Sing. First Lutheran Church, West Barnstable, Cape Cod

Sonne der Gerechtigkeit — ("At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing") — unison voices, organ, brass quintet

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RzmgUcvjOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RzmgUcvjOk (embedding disabled)

Originally the tune to a 15th-century secular folk song ("Der reich Mann war geritten aus," or "The rich man had ridden out"), "Sonne der Gerechtigkeit" was adopted by the Bohemian Brethren for the 1566 hymnal, Kirchengeseng, where it was set to a text beginning "Sun of Righteousness." The adoption of a sacred text to secular music — contrafactum — was common in the medieval era and often the work of Catholic friars. (A similar 19th-century example of contrafactum is the setting of William Chatterton Dix's text "What Child is This?" to the English folk tune "Greensleeves.")

"Sonne der Gerchtigkeit" is commonly used to accompany the hymn, "At the Lamb's High Feast We Sing." The text refers to the ancient custom of administering to new Christians the sacraments of baptism and holy communion at the first Easter Sunday mass following their catechumenate. Vested in white robes, they were admitted for the first time to the "banquet of the Lamb" — the eucharistic feast. Robert Campbell (1814-1868), a Scotsman who converted to Roman Catholicism, translated the seventh-century Latin text to English.

This video is a demo of the sheet music available from Con Spirito Music. Visit conspiritomusic.com.

Gotteslobvideo (GL 481): Sonne der Gerechtigkeit

Saturday, April 04, 2015

"Groundhog" -- an old southern Appalachian children's song for Clayville-Prairieland jam sessions

Since the first of April fell on a Wednesday, our schedule of slow jams is a little cockeyed this month. Plus we have the "Fake It Till You Make It" workshop coming up at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop. So I'll post our schedule here for the rest of the month.

  • Tuesday, April 7, 7-9 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield. Our "first Tuesday" Prairieland Strings jam. That's only three days from now. Yikes!

  • Thursday, April 16, 7-9 p.m. at Atonement. The "third Thursday" jam. It's only a little more than a week later, since the first was on a Wednesday.

  • Saturday, April 18, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the barn at Clayville. "Fake It Till You Make It" workshop. FREE OF CHARGE! Basic jamming skills. Beginner-friendly but focused on developing skills for playing in a group with other instruments. I'll introduce a couple of new ideas, but I hope we can all share tips on how we learned -- what worked for us.

Here's a tune that's a lot of fun, and one that's easy for newbies to master. It's called "Groundhog." It was one of the very first tunes I learned on a mountain dulcimer back in the day in East Tennessee. Since it's a song instead of a dance tune, people just play it straight through. (Instead of AABB it's more like AAAA till you run out of verses.) It's commonly played in G or A, but we'll play it in D.

A lead sheet with notation, chords and dulcimer tab for "Groundhog" is in Steve Seifert's "Join the Jam." And Sr. Margaret Mary, a music teacher has a slightly different version with notation, chords and dulcimer tab on the EverythingDulcimer.com website at http://www.everythingdulcimer.com/files/tab/ground_hog.pdf. Link below for a set of lyrics.

NOTE: The printed music for Steve's version and Sr. Margaret Mary's are a little different, but I can practically guarantee they'll sound just fine together after we've played through them a couple of times.

Here are some YouTube clips:

Ground Hog - Peter Feldmann. Uploaded Feb. 2, 2013. Played on a "catskin" banjo (well, that's what they call them -- but see below) made by a master craftsman in North Carolina.

Feldman, who has recorded children's songs and other folk music, adds:

I learnt this song from Frank Proffitt, of Reese, NC, back in 1962. Franks was a fine singer, banjo and guitar picker, as well as a maker of fretless banjos and mountain dulcimers. I got a banjo from Frank in 1963. Its head is ground hog skin, so it could not be more appropriate to use for this fine old folk song. We spent four days together in Chicago when Frank came up for a visit. He told me the best banjo head skin was cat skin, but that his wife frowned on his shooting them ... groundhog was his fall-back position.

It probably should be added here that mountain people, no doubt including Frank Proffitt, have a dry sense of humor.

If the song is known to at all, it's in this version sung by Doc Watson and family in a 1990 recording for Smithsonian Folkways:

Lyrics as Doc Watson recorded them are available on line at http://lyrics.wikia.com/Doc_Watson:Groundhog

Thursday, April 02, 2015

Johann Walther -- misc. links and cites to 1819 psalmbook

Jens Fredborg playlist on YouTube -- piano https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0PdtFNbg6wJBNhDmQO7qTNK2haDH9MDD.

Swedish Wikipedia http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Walter

• Dig vare lov, o Jesus Krist (1695 nr 125, 1819 nr 62, 1986 nr 431) ur hans koralbok från 1524
• Med lust och glädje tänker (1986 nr 324) skriven 1552
• Sitt öga Jesus öppnat har (1819 nr 103) och samma melodi som till:
• I dödens bojor Kristus låg efter Christ lag in Todesbanden (1695 nr 163, 1986 nr 467)
• Som skimret över hav och sky (1986 nr 178) tonsatt 1541 Svensk text av Anders Frostenson ©
• Vi på jorden leva här (1819 nr 26)
• Vi tror på en allsmäktig Gud (1695 nr 4, 1819 nr 17, 1937 nr 26)

Geystliche gesangk Buchleyn http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geystliche_gesangk_Buchleyn

  • Dig, Helge Ande, bedja vi (1695 nr 182, 1819 nr 135, 1986 nr 362) med ursprung i en medeltida "leiser", allmän på 1200-talet.
  • Gud trefaldig, statt oss bi (XXXIIII, 1695 nr 189, 1819 nr 22, 1986 nr 336) processionssång från 1400-talet. Finns på Wikisource
  • Lov vare dig, o Jesu Krist (1819 nr 62)
  • Vi på jorden leva här (III, 1695 nr 398, 1819 nr 26, 1937 nr 153)
  • Vi tro på en allsmäktig Gud (1695 nr 4, 1819 nr 17, 1937 nr 26)
Gud trefaldig, stå oss bi

Fredborg: Dig vare lov, o Jesus Krist - Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev23rukZiI8

Lista över psalmer i 1819 års psalmbok i Svenska kyrkan: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_%C3%B6ver_psalmer_i_1819_%C3%A5rs_psalmbok_i_Svenska_kyrkan

Lord keep us steadfast in Thy word / Behåll oss vid ditt rena ord. http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beh%C3%A5ll_oss_vid_ditt_rena_ord

Behåll oss vid ditt rena ord är en tysk psalm, Ach, bleib bey uns HERR JEsu skriven 1571 av Nikolaus Selnecker, översatt av Jesper Swedberg 1694 till en psalm med titelraden "Ack, bliv hos oss, o Jesu Krist". Enligt 1937 års psalmbok var första versen skriven omkring 1540 av Philipp Melanchthon. ... I 1697 års koralbok och 1939 års koralbok används samma melodi som till psalmen Så är fullkomnat, Jesus kär (1695, nr 160) som är svensk och från 1697. I Den svenska psalmboken 1986 används en melodi av Martin Luther från 1542 som används för O Gud, behåll oss vid ditt ord (1695, nr 295).

1819 års psalmbok som nr 120 med titelraden "Ack, bliv hos oss, o Jesu Krist", under rubriken "Jesu andliga världsregering och vård om sin stridande församling".