For a year or two while I was a teenager, in addition to sacrament meeting, Sunday school, and RS/PH/YM/YW, we had a fourth church period. After sacrament meeting ended, the Primary teachers would leave to set up their classes. And, while they did that, the rest of us stayed in the chapel for a singing practice.
Now I was a teenager; I believe this was a formal church program, though it’s possible that it was just my ward or just my stake. Either way, this extra singing time was an incredible religious innovation. Why? Well, while we have a whole lot of hymns to choose from, we mostly sing the same one or two dozen, plus the Christmas ones in December.
And that makes sense: more often than not, if an unfamiliar hymn is called,[fn1] you get mostly silence, with a handful of tentative voices trying to follow the music. So the catch-22: your ward is mostly going to pick familiar hymns so that everybody can participate, but if it only picks familiar hymns, nobody’s going to get familiar with unfamiliar hymns.
This fifteen minute post-sacrament meeting hymn practice was aimed at fixing that problem (and, of course, giving Primary teachers a head start): in my ward, we’d practice (I think) two unfamiliar hymns each week. And then, the following week, we’d review the hymns from before and, if they were comfortable, move on to additional hymns.
I have no idea why the church/my stake/my ward stopped. It did, but in the near future, it would truly behoove us to pick up that post-sacrament meeting hymn practice again.
Why?
Over at Times and Seasons, Chad Nielson has been writing about the church’s forthcoming new hymnbook (the first new one since, I believe, 1985). As he describes it, the new hymnbook will likely have our familiar hymns, but it’ll also have both new and new-to-us hymns.
He even has guesses for what five of those new hymns might possibly be. And one of his guesses caught my eye: “This Little Light of Mine.”
I’m sure I had hear the song before, but my biggest memory of “This Little Light of Mine” is of three men parading through a subway car when I lived in New York City. As they walked through the car, they sang, with clear voices, stunning harmony, and perfect gospel swing.
Part of me desperately wants “This Little Light of Mine” to find a place in our hymnody. It’s a joyous song; it may or may not be a spiritual, but it grew and matured in the Black church tradition in the U.S., and has become an important part of the civil rights movement.
But part of me doesn’t want us to import it. Why? Well, after reading Chad’s blog post, I Googled whether the Mormon Tabernacle Choir[fn2] had recorded a version. They have, an arrangement by Mack Wilberg. And it is, well, not great. I mean, if you can’t say something nice. So I’m not going to say much about it.
But their arrangement loses the swing, loses the backbeat, and loses the passion. In their arrangement, it’s been transformed into a soft, timid, dirge-like piece of music,[fn3] without any of the elements that make it inspiring and beautiful.
Those elements—swing, syncopation, improvisation, call-and-response—aren’t part of our white, Protestant, North American and British hymn sensibility.
But here’s the thing: according to the church’s announcement, while we’re keeping our hymns, we’re also explicitly borrowing from other religious traditions and trying to create a globally-relevant hymnbook. That doesn’t mean trying to shoehorn other traditions’ hymns into our model—it means embracing diverse means of worship through music, expanding our own horizons, and learning to worship in ways we’re not yet comfortable with.
So I hope we do get “This Little Light of Mine.” And I hope the arrangement doesn’t sound like what the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang—I hope it’s arranged in a way that embraces the hymn popularized and perfected in the Black church. And I sincerely hope that, as we add this and other hymns to our repertoire, that we’ll also take the time—in church—to learn how to sing and appreciate these unfamiliar hymns.
So how should “This Little Light of Mine” sound? Below are a bunch of versions that I truly like. And we’re not going to sound like Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, or Bruce Springsteen in church. But I hope we can all appreciate the way that each of these performers lets the inherent joy and worship of “This Little Light of Mine” shine.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Her version of the song is just awesome. But also, without her, there wouldn’t have been rock’n’roll as we know it. Just wait for her guitar solo.
The Staples Singers: They were gospel. They were civil rights. And they could do no wrong musically.
Sam Cooke: A gospel singer-turned-soul singer, he seems to have popularized the song as something that could be sung by a solo performer (as opposed to as a choir). And while there is almost nobody in the world whose voice matches his, he demonstrates how you can do the song slowly, but with passion, soul, and worship. This is a slow version, but not a dirge. (One of the hard things about truly incorporating this into our hymnody: there’s an improvisatory aspect to it, and a call-and-response, both of which Cooke does.)
Aretha Franklin: Honestly, I hope everybody knows who the Queen of Soul is. This is an even slower arrangement than Sam Cooke’s. But notice how it is still moving forward; maybe it’s taking work to get to the promised land, but you can feel its movement, its determination, and, frankly, its salvation.
Soweto Gospel Choir: I know literally nothing about this choir, but I like their arrangement. It highlights that this is an worldwide song.
Gospel Dream: A French gospel choir. This sounds most like what I’d expect to hear from a gospel choir, as opposed to a soloist. But note that the way the song works is that there is a soloist over the choir. How would that work in congregational singing? That’s something we’d have to figure out.
Bruce Springsteen: Since the early 2000s, Bruce has spent a lot of time singing and recording the corpus of Alan Lomax’s folk song archeology. And honestly, he does it really well. Including this version of “This Little Light of Mine,” which sounds like the kind of number I want to be in when I get to heaven.
I’m not convinced there’s a good way to make “This Little Light of Mine” Mormon. I’m even less convinced that making it Mormon is a good goal.
But I also think we can expand Mormonism to learn, and to embrace, “This Little Light of Mine.” And I hope we have the desire to expand our sense of worship, and to expand our tastes and abilities, so that we can let ourselves fit this wonderful song. To do it, though, we’ll need to work at it.
[fn1] Yeah, I know. That’s how you choose songs at a jam session, not church. But it’s more fun to write that way.
[fn2] Yes, I know the choir has been renamed. No, I don’t care. And no, I’m not willing to bother remembering what its new name is.
[fn3] It’s a separate conversation from this one, but we ought to talk about why it is that we think that slow and quiet = reverent and worshipful, while spirited and joyful doesn’t.
Photo by Michael Maasen on Unsplash