How Can I Explain the Backstory of “How Can I Keep from Singing?”?

I think this is the second time I’ve had a double question mark in a post title. Always up for a grammatical challenge, that’s me. (That’s I?)

Anyway, when my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, recently rehearsed this piece the conductor said, “This is one of the most-frequently arranged songs around.” There’s no way to definitively quantify the number of arrangements out there for any piece, but it does seem to be quite popular. As usual I’m more interested in the words than the music, but the tune is truly lovely, written by a Baptist minister, Robert Lowry, in the mid-1800’s. I was interested to see that his three other most-famous hymns, “Christ Arose,” “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus,” and “Shall We Gather at the River?” are all songs I’ve sung in church myself. I love, love, love “Shall We Gather” and always sort of thought that it was a folk song or spiritual.

Let’s move on to the words of “How Can I Keep,” which are much more in my bailiwick, or wheelhouse, or whatever. The first question is, “Who wrote them?” I’m happy to report that our sheet music for the Z. Randall Stroope arrangement we’re performing has it right: the original author was an amazingly prolific American woman who lived from 1820-1915, Anna Barlett Warner. I wish I had known about her back in 2009 when my family and I traveled around in upstate New York, as her home is now a museum that’s part of the US Military Academy at West Point. We could have swung by there on our way out of New York City and seen the restoration that’s been done, not only to the house but also to the gardens, following her month-by-month descriptions in her book Gardening by Myself. (It’s still available in print, astonishingly enough.) Our sheet music says that Warner “lead (sic) religious services at West Point for many years [and was] buried with full military honors.” So fascinating! I’d love to know more, as it seems very strange that a woman would have been leading services at the then-all-male Academy. I’m sure there’s more to the story, but I’ll have to leave it there. It’s kind of sad that her lovely lyrics are often misattributed and/or thought to be anonymous (perhaps because Lowry listed them as such in his published hymnal) and that she’s most famous today for the words to “Jesus Loves Me.” A perfectly good song, let me hasten to say, but not terribly representative of her work.

Back to our selection. I do find myself following even more rabbit trails than usual with this post. (Hard to believe.) Warner’s original lyrics are much more distinctly Christian than the version we’re singing. One of the Chorale’s members showed me the Warner version in the hymnbook of the Lutheran church where we rehearse and perform, saying that she wanted that song at her funeral. I pointed out that a) her funeral wasn’t going to happen for a long time, and b) we weren’t singing what was in the hymnbook. Here’s the clearest example of how the words have been changed:

So what happened? Well, the folk singer Pete Seeger happened. He heard the song from a family friend, Doris Plenn, who’d heard it from her grandmother. Seeger apparently liked the tune and the overall idea of trust and faith, but he’s the one who took out the doctrine. Oh, and added a verse that Plenn wrote:

When tyrants tremble, sick with fear,
And hear their death-knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near,
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile,
Our thoughts to them go winging;
When friends by shame are undefiled,
How can I keep from singing?

This verse isn’t some generalized condemnation of tyranny vs. liberty but instead a specific reference to 1950’s McCarthyism and the “witch hunts” of the House Un-American Committee. No surprise, then, that the song became very popular as part of the folk-music revival of the 1960’s.

One more interesting rabbit hole: the Irish singer Enya’s performance, which almost landed in her copyright violation hot water. Plenn had apparently told Seeger that the song was “a traditional Quaker/Shaker hymn,” I guess not knowing about Anna Barlett Warner’s true authorship. So that’s how Seeger published the song, and he also included Plenn’s verse, presenting the whole thing as being in the public domain. Somehow, though, when Enya released her mega-popular version, Seeger’s publisher decided that maybe . . . it wasn’t public domain, after all. I’m sure there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing behind the scenes. In the end it was decided that Plenn had never wanted her verse to be copyrighted but simply preserved and publicized, and Enya was let off the hook.

Remember way back at the beginning of this post when I said that the sheet music for the Stroope arrangement the Chorale is singing correctly listed Anna Warner as the author of the words? I decided to leave that statement as is but make the point here at the end that the notes don’t mention Seeger as the author of the later version that Stroope uses. So there really should be a further footnote explaining that Warner’s lyrics were revised by Seeger. Doris Plenn’s words aren’t used in the Stroope arrangement, so we’re safe on that score.

And Stroope has also changed the tune. I’ve driven myself crazy trying to find a YouTube performance of the authentic Lowry tune, finally realizing that I was really trying to find the Stroope one. And I have to say that I like that one the best. (I could write another 500 words on Z. Randall Stroope, but I’ll restrain myself and instead point you to his website. We’ve sung other of his arrangements in the past; they’ve all been challenging and beautiful. You can therefore, if you feel so inclined, read the post I wrote about one such arrangement of his that we’ve sung and thus find out a little bit about his family history.)

And with that I’ll close, except for a plethora of videos.

Here’s a performance of the Stroope arrangement that absolutely could not be more timely and appropriate. I think it’s fair to say that this choir didn’t let anything keep them from singing!

Here’s Pete Seeger singing his version:

Here’s Enya’s performanc that brought her to the attention of Seeger’s publishers:

And, just because I love it so much, “Shall We Gather at the River” from a Christmas Revels CD: Not sure what Robert Lowry would think of it–has a definite Dixieland flavor, doesn’t it?