Bill’s Midwinter Music – Dec 30; the penultimate posting for the year

Playlist

1. Give Good Gifts The Rose Ensemble 1:40

2. A New Year Randy Folger & the Joy of Angels album choir :58

3. unnamed circular march The Tudor Choir :42

4. Holy Ground Craig Taubman 3:55

5. Walking in the Air Jackie Evancho 3:30

6. Let the Good Guys Win Toot Sweet 5:02

Music notes

Give Good Gifts Today I begin with a mini-set of three songs and mouth-music chants composed by members of the Shaker religious movement. They were a denomination that had broken off from the Quakers in England when they moved from ecstatic to silent worship in the latter 1700s. Under the leadership of Mother Anne some of the adherents to the old ways moved to America to live a simple communal lifestyle as they awaited the Second Coming.

The Shaker movement thrived and grew in late 18^th century America, reaching its height in the 1830s when they had nineteen villages in eight states, but since then the movement has been in decline. Only one small Shaker community continues to exist today, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, and they are down to only two members.

The Shakers were perhaps the most musical of all religious denominations. They believed that the tunes and songs that came to them were gifts from God, many intended to accompany daily tasks since for them everyday living was a form of worship. The texts and melodies of over 12,000 songs from the sect’s heydays have survived (written in the group’s own distinctive musical notation.) Give Good Gifts is of anonymous composition and is from the tunebook Original Shaker Music published by the Mount Lebanon collective in 1893. It is performed here by a quartet from Minneapolis’ Rose Ensemble.

Give good gifts one to another
Peace, joy, and comfort gladly bestow
Harbor no ill 'gainst sister or brother
Smooth life's journey, as you onward go (x2)

Broad as the sunshine, free as the showers
So shed an influence, blessing to prove
Give for the noblest of efforts your pow'rs
Blest and be blest, is the law of love (x2)

This unusual format of singing each verse twice is very characteristic of Shaker songs. I have a lot more information about the Shaker movement and their music in last year’s Dec 10 posting of these songs and three others.

A New Year and unnamed circular march both include mouth music and would have accompanied a distinctive style of circular dance that was part of both Shaker worship and community celebrations, such as on Christmas. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I’ll save a lot of pixels by giving you a rare (for this year) photo.

The above is a lithograph of a circular dance in the meeting house of the Shaker village in New Lebanon, New York. That was the Shakers’ largest community with approximately 600 members and 250 buildings at its peak in the 1850s.

The first mouth-music chant, A New Year, is from the only album of Shaker Christmas songs that I could track down. It is called the Joy of Angels and this song is led by the late Randy Folger, the long-time music director, music curator and presenter at the Pleasant Hill Shaker Village Historic Site. It was written in 1815 by Elder John Dunlavy of that community and was almost certainly discovered and transcribed from the Shaker notation by Randy. It is followed by an unnamed circular march sung by The Tudor Choir and recorded on one of their two albums of Shaker music. Again, for further information about Shakers and their music see here. Naturally, dance-chants like these were not this short in Shaker life. They went on, and on, and on, and . . .

Holy Ground This is not a Shaker song but it certainly expresses their perspective about life. It was written and is performed by Craig Taubman, the host and producer of a 2008 PBS television special called Lights: Celebrate Hanukkah Live in Concert. The song, which was the climax of the concert, was accompanied by an interpretive dance performed by the Keshet Chaim Dance Ensemble. You can watch that here. This and three other Hanukkah songs were on my Dec 7 posting last year.

Every second, every minute,
Every hour, every day,
Every thing, every one, every place, every way,
Where you walk, where you stand,
Where you love, where you praise,
All of life is holy ground.

Every he, every she, every what, every who,
It’s in her, it’s in them, it’s in me, it’s in you,
In the bitter, in the sweet, in the calm, in the storm,
All of life is holy ground.

CHORUS:
So walk as if it’s holy ground,
Breathe as if it’s all around.
Talk and make a holy sound,
Take your shoes off you’re on holy ground.

When you hurt, when you heal,
When you laugh, when you pray,
When you hold, when you keep,
When you give it away,
Every second, every minute, every hour, every day,
All of life is holy ground.

CHORUS:

BRIDGE:
We are one people, one story, one tapestry we weave.
One journey, one glory, one legacy we leave.

Every second, every minute,
Every hour, every day,
Every thing, every one, every place, every way,
Where you walk, where you stand,
Where you love, where you praise,
All of life is holy ground.
Can you feel the holy ground?

Take your shoes off . . .
You’re on holy ground.

Walking in the Air My musical advent calendar last year included four postings as a sub-series I called Not only for kids that featured songs, mostly by children’s performers, that I thought would be entertaining for both children and adults. That series didn’t include this song because musically it didn’t seem to fit in, which is ironic because it is the only song that I posted in 2023 in which a child is the main performer. Jackie Evancho recorded this when she was 11 years old!

She was a child singing prodigy who first got national attention at the age of ten by making it to the finals of the fifth season of the America’s Got Talent TV show (2010) and getting second place.

Here is the story behind the Walking in the Air song as told by pop music historian Tim Neely:

In 1978, Raymond Briggs (1934-2022) put together a wordless picture book called The Snowman, a charming tale of a young boy who builds a snowman and sees it come to life at midnight that night. Numerous adventures follow until the morning, when the boy finds that his snowy friend has melted and is no more. Briggs told the Radio Times in 2012, “I don’t have happy endings. I create what seems natural and inevitable. The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life.”

The book sold well early on, but by 1980, 50,000 copies sat moldering in a British warehouse because, according to the book’s publisher, Iain Harvey of Hamish Hamilton, parents couldn’t read a book with no dialogue to their children as a bedtime story. Enter John Coates, a producer at British firm TVC, who was interested in adapting the book for television. Coates employed prominent British composer Howard Blake (born 1938) to write the music for The Snowman. One of the pieces in the score was a song Blake had written several years earlier, literally on the back of an envelope, called “Walking in the Air.” It accompanied a four-minute-long sequence of the boy and the snowman flying north, a journey that led to a meeting with Father Christmas near the North Pole.

Christmas was nowhere in the original book, but Briggs said in the same 2012 Radio Times interview, “It’s a bit corny and twee, dragging in Christmas, as The Snowman had nothing to do with that, but it worked extremely well.” Other adaptations were made to the book, including having the snowman ride a motorcycle through the woods and giving the boy a name (James).

The Snowman debuted on Channel 4, a then-new public-service TV station, on December 26, 1982, Boxing Day. It was an immediate smash, and to this day, Channel 4 shows it annually, usually on Christmas Eve.

It garnered some attention in the States; in 1983, The Snowman was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, but it didn’t win. Shortly after that, PBS expressed an interest in airing The Snowman, but it felt that in order to get an underwriter for the film, a big name needed to supply the spoken introduction. (Briggs, the book’s author, was the narrator for the 1982 original.) So in 1984, David Bowie (1947-2016) recorded a new introduction, which was then incorporated into the film. The Snowman, even with the star power, failed to become a perennial in the U.S.

If you haven’t seen it, here is a 3:45 YouTube clip of the Walking in the Air part of the show so you can see what you have been missing, and here is the full 25 minute Channel 4 show in HD. And here are the lyrics to the song:

We’re walking in the air
We’re floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below are sleeping as we fly

I’m holding very tight
I’m riding in the midnight blue
I’m finding I can fly so high above with you

Far across the world
The villages go by like trees
The rivers and the hills
The forests and the streams

Children gaze open mouth
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below believes their eyes

We’re surfing in the air
We’re swimming in the frozen sky
We’re drifting over icy
Mountains floating by

Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep
Arousing of a mighty monster from its sleep

We’re walking in the air
We’re floating in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly

I had this recording for a few years, saving it for the right context to include it in one of my samplers. It is so very unlike any other Christmas seasonal song. Despite the fact that I couldn’t fit it into the Not only for kids sub-series I wasn’t going to pass it up again in 2023 so I included it in my Dec 19 posting that I headed A Christmas song hodge-podge. There you can read more about Jackie Evancho and listen to a Scotch dialect version of a well-known American Christmas song.

Let the Good Guys Win I decided to post this song today to help get you in the mood for tomorrow, New Year’s Eve. Last year I posted it on Christmas Day as the closing song for my Bill’s Midwinter Music series. Lyrics below.

As I said last year, I think that these are the perfect thoughts for bringing in a new year. It is not that I have anything against the song Auld Lang Syne as the current de facto New Year’s anthem– there is a place for remembering the past at this time of year. But I think that observance of the New Year should not be about dwelling on the past: It should be about the future. We already have a custom of reflecting upon our hopes and resolutions at this time of year: Why not express them in our New Year’s music? That is what this song does.

The song is performed here by a short-lived band based in St. John, New Brunswick called Toot Sweet, with the lead singing by Marylin Inch. The song was written by Murray McLaughlan in 1988 and it definitely fits into the category of being an obscure Canadian song that deserves to get recognition and appreciation. You can read more about both the song and Toot Sweet, as well as listen to what IMHO is a great set of midwinter music, here.

Let the Good Guys Win
by Murray McLauchlan (1988)

May I get what I want Not what I deserve
May the coming year not throw a single curve
May I hurt nobody May I tell no lies
If I can't go on give me the strength to try

Chorus:
Bring the old year out Bring the new year in
Bring us all good luck Let the good guys win (x2)

May the one you love Be the one you get
May you get some place you haven't been to yet
And may your friends around you Never do you harm
May your eyes be clear And may your heart be strong

Chorus

May the times to come Be the best you've had
May peace rule the world Let it make us glad
When you see something wrong Try and make it right
Pull a shadowed world Into the bright sunlight

Chorus

Let the good guys win
Let the good guys win
Let the good guys win

Reminiscence

I compiled this series only last year, which means the memories are stored in the hardest-to-access part of my brain. As I recall, getting the series ready on schedule was somewhere between my stressful year 2021 and stress-free 2022.

I began working on it in early November (as I did this year) which should have been plenty of time, but I rather got carried away on the research and writing side of things. As with 2022 there was no attempt at having a yearly theme, since I think that I will never again do the yearly theme thing again since this songs-of-the-day format enables a variety of daily themes.

That meant that I had the freedom to access to all of my candidate song and tune files. But my write-ups returned to being somewhat longer, with individual days increasingly becoming longer thematic sets. They were not as long as this year (which are mostly in the 15-16 minute range) but they averaged about ten minutes each with more multi-song sets, compared to 6-7 minutes in 2022. That led to my write-ups getting longer.

For several years I had been reserving Shaker songs to become the theme of a yearly sampler, but those CD sampler days are behind me now, and it was becoming obvious that there would never be enough recorded Shaker Christmas music for such a project. But I had enough for a great Shaker Christmas one-day set in the new format, with other songs still in reserve for future years. The research into the history of the Shakers, officially known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, proved fascinating (I do recommend that you read about them here if you haven’t already done so) but it gobbled into my time budget.

Like this year I always stayed well ahead of having to meet a daily deadline so it never got stressful, but the timeline did get a little tight. It was an enjoyable experience, both in selecting the music and going on a research and writing binge. But I admit that I was a bit relieved when it was over and I could return to assembling and writing about jigsaw puzzles.