Roy Exum
Let’s pretend that you and your squeeze have saved up for over a year and have finally made it to Las Vegas and the Celine Dion show. You two are sitting right down front, all cozy and both smelling good, when, towards the end of her dazzling act, an unseen voice announces, “In order to save time, Miss Dion will sing only the first and third verses of her awarded-winning song, “My Heart Will Go On.”
Are you kidding me? Somebody would throw a knife. Why they’d burn down the casino.
Here’s a better one. You’re in south Georgia and the Lynyrd Skynyrd Band has got it rocking as brightly as the sun. There are about 20,000 people just as heated up, motorcycles and big-wheeled pickups everywhere, when a little guy suddenly takes a microphone between songs and says, “In order not to pay the police any overtime, the song “Free Bird’ will last no longer than four minutes today.”
Well, I know some hairy-legged “buffaloes” who can leisurely drink two long-necks apiece during “Free Bird.” They also think it ought to be the national anthem. I can guarantee you there would then ensue the greatest outbreak since typhus, but this would be of the ratta tat tat variety.
This is all to say the older I get, the more I cannot fathom why today’s warmest churches limit some of the world’s most beloved hymns to only the first and last verse. How does that work? I am hardly trying to be critical or righteous, but, as of late, I have been paying more attention to the words of my music than I once did. I can’t get my arms around why people enjoy singing just half of a hymn.
I adore music. I noticed the other day that if I played every song on my iPod it would take over three days. An iPod is a gadget where you can download your favorite songs onto a deal about the size of a cell phone and carry your favorites around with you.
I’ll tell you about “iPod For Dummies” another day, but it is a fabulous invention and millions of kids now have one. Those wires you see coming out of some athletes during warm-ups on TV are not electrodes. They are headsets for iPods and the music helps them, you know, get in the groove.
The church’s gorgeous songs are obviously the bedrock of today’s music all over the world. Hymns have inspired countless singers, songs and the words you hear. I believe the recipe to a good song has three equal parts and the hymns we have loved for all our lives have easily outlived what we once thought was the cat’s meow.
The first is the music itself. Read what Elvis once said, or the Beatles, and you’ll find Bach and Beethoven and the other classic composers led the way to the marvelous modern-day melodies we carry in our hearts every day.
The second part is the singer or the performer. The best way for me to describe it is that I have six versions of “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and just as many of “Amazing Grace” on my iPod. I defy anyone to tell me one version of either one is better than another. The arrangements are different, the tempo changes, but each stands alone as a tribute to the miracle of music. Great songs stand alone.
Third and last are the words, or the lyrics. These never change. Some of the world’s greatest writers have put their prose to song. I get tickled when today’s generation of kids say they can’t stand poetry and then get in the car and sing the words to every song on the radio. It is the words, then, that speak to my soul.
It is obvious I have no formal education as a writer. What I know I gleaned from reading the great writers who I adore, trying to adapt their wizardry to my bumbling efforts. But if you want to make one paragraph move into the next, if you wonder how to make a story flow, the simplest thing in the world is to follow the river of a song and the word pattern of the greatest hymns you can find.
You see, just about every song I love is actually a story and there are thousands of examples. One of my favorite country performers is Tom T. Hall whose moniker is “The Storyteller.” Just listen real closely to Frank Sinatra sing “My Way” or Jimmy Darren sing “Softly as I Leave You” or Barbra Streisand sing “The Way We Were.” Each is wonderful to hear, but go further; really focus on the words and these songs have something more to share.
Now, far and away the best of all are the words to the hymns we love. Have you ever heard Larnelle Harris team up with Sandi Patty on “I Just Saw Jesus”? Tell me if you’ve ever lip-synched as George Beverly Shea sings “How Great Thou Art.” What verse are you going to tell the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to leave out when they put “It Is Well With My Soul” or “A Mighty Fortress Is My God” in your lap?
Tell Josh Groban to hold it to just the first and last verse of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” Ask the geniuses we now know as Il Divo why they not only sang every verse of “Amazing Grace” but then made it longer by even repeating a verse? Tell country singer Randy Travis to clip a little out of “In The Garden” so not so many of us will cry. Again, how do I get my arms around that kind of thinking?
I have literally left church with a bulletin to come home, get my old hymnal, and read “the rest of the song” because in every one of them, is a lesson. It is a lesson I want and a lesson I need. I savor that and when you look in the lower corner of your hymn book and see when a song was written, how is it a 175-year-old song fits you today like an expensive glove?
Again, I am not trying to be critical, but, then again, I’m not going to read just the odd-numbered chapters in any book I buy to save time. What’s time got to do with worshiping the Lord? I need the full dose, not just half of each day or each night.
royexum@aol.com