The simplified explanation of how Black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs.
There’s the added wrinkle that the spirituals are true folk songs; that is, they were not originally written down but were passed down orally. Thus there are always multiple versions of any spiritual. Here’s a good explanation of how the process of transcribing the spirituals, but indeed any folk music, worked, as described in an article about the efforts of John W. Work III, a scholar and teacher at Fisk University in the early 1900’s:
Choral composers are always on the hunt for suitable texts. Unless you’re writing something along the lines of the “Humming Chorus” from Madame Butterly or Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” you have to find suitable words. As I’ve outlined in other material, choral texts can have many sources: You may be commissioned to write a piece with the proviso that you use a certain text, or you may love a certain poem and decide to set it to music, or you may have an idea for a melody and look for words that fit, or you may ask someone to write the text for you, or you may write it yourself.
Would a musical be produced today that’s built around the idea of sticking with an abusive spouse no matter what and to some extent normalizing the abuse? Could it include the line, “Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you — without hurtin’?” To which the answer is yes: “It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” And that line is delivered from a mother to a daughter, thus paving the way for perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Honestly! The musical is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel, and it’s an odd duck, often labeled as a “problem” musical or even as “the wife-beater musical.” Billy Bigelow, said wife-beater and main villain, echoes other characters in popular theater such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and John Wayne’s character in the film McLintock!, to name just a couple, who hit their wives and not only get away with it but whose wives respond lovingly. (I am horrified by the spanking scene at the end of McLintock!, and apparently it’s not the only such scene in the movie.) When he’s asked about his abuse by the Starkeeper, head man in heaven’s waiting room, Billy Bigelow says he does not beat his wife. “I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her,” he explains. But to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph: Yes, indeed, Carousel is performed today, sometimes with the problematic lines cut and sometimes with them included. One production compromised by having the dead Billy shake his head “No!” in response to the “not hurt at all” line. That’s perhaps the best way to deal with the issue, since just cutting those few lines in no way erases the overall arc of the plot. Indeed, Carousel was considered groundbreaking at the time of its original production because of its anti-hero lead male character and its tragic plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already broken new ground in their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which used the songs to advance a well-developed plot, and Hammerstein had included controversial ideas about racism in his collaboration with Jerome Kern for Show Boat.
“Great Day” is a spiritual, meaning that it falls into the category of true folk music, a genre that starts out with oral traditions and only later involves writing the words down. By the time a true folk song is committed to paper it almost always has multiple versions. And why do I keep using the word “true”? Because there are many songs written “in the style of” a folk song that aren’t truly so since they have a known, single author. In the case of this version of the piece (which my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, will be performing in March 20241) there is an arranger, Warren Martin, but no composer or lyricist, so we seem to be in the “true folk” category. In my signature bopping around the Internet looking for clues I’ve found a number of sites that have published the lyrics, but there are none that try to unpack the layers of meaning contained in them. So I’m venturing out on my own here. If you’d like to read a general discussion of spirituals and their origins, I’d recommend that you read an earlier post on this website, “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”
I am reminded of this quotation: “It is not enough to be right. You must prevail.” Let me rephrase that wording to fit here: “It is not enough to be creative. You must be heard.” Gwyneth Walker certainly fits into that principle, as she has become a successful composer first through talent (of course) but then through sheer hard work and business savvy. She has a very interesting website that includes some of the interviews and lectures she’s given over the years, and I was especially struck by her essay “Yes, This Is a Business!” The entire piece is well worth reading; here I’ll quote just one definitive statement: “I feel that a composer cannot live in his/her own world entirely. Music is a communicative and social language. It requires composers, performers and audiences. And all three need each other.”
What started out as a beautiful but, as far as I’m concerned, a little stuffy, hymn for the Christian church feast day of Epiphany, written by the Anglican bishop Reginald Heber and published in 1811, underwent a sea change after it voyaged to America. It acquired a new tune via the shape-note tradition that was developed in the mid-1830’s and became especially popular in Appalachia. (You can read a bit about shape-note singing in my post A Rich American Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”) It also acquired a new first verse, with the original first verse becoming the refrain, at least in some versions. So I’ll start with the newly-purposed refrain:
Well, I guess we have to take the composer at his word, since he starts out like this:
The sun is shining, the grass is green, The orange and palm trees sway; There’s never been such a day In Beverly Hills, L.A. And I am longing to be up north . .
Man, if I went through this song line by line, starting to write as I am on Nov. 1, giving all the variants both of the song itself and also its precursors, Christmas would be long gone by the time I finished. I’m sure there have been whole doctoral dissertations written on just this subject. But not everyone shares my obsession with history and etymology, so I’m going to concentrate on this version, usually sung or performed as a Christmas song even though none of the verses except for the first one refers in any direct way to the Christmas story.
I started out this post with what I assumed would be an easy-to-answer question: Why did Stephen Schwartz end up collaborating with someone named Steve Young for this song, writing the music but having Young write the lyrics? Schwartz is somewhat of a Broadway legend, having had at one point three hit Broadway shows running at once (Pippin, Godspell, and The Magic Show). In 2003 Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics for the musical Wicked, which just celebrated its 20th year on Broadway. Yes, 20. So there was no shortage of material about Schwartz, but I couldn’t find anything about his writing this specific song. And I became somewhat obsessed with finding out who this Steve Young was. While I don’t typically share my research process, such as it is, about these posts, this one seemed interesting enough to include here. First I googled “Steve Young” and came up with a Wikipedia entry about someone of that name who was very famous for something called the “outlaw movement” in country music. Hmmm. That didn’t sound too promising. After a delightful e-mail exchange with Young’s son, Jubal Lee* (Young died in 2016), we concluded that I had the wrong Steve Young. Jubal said that he was sure his dad wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet about working with the creator of Wicked and therefore miss out on a chance to impress his granddaughter.
My choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has sung a great jazzy arrangement of “I[‘ve] Got No Strings” by composer/arranger Paul Langford. The original song was written for the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio and was also released the same year, with slightly different lyrics, by Decca Records. Most post-1940 performances use the Decca lyrics, I suspect because they fit into a more generalized meaning than the film’s wording, which is closely tied to the scene at the marionette theater where Pinocchio performs along with other, stringed puppets. I’ll include videos and lyrics for the two different versions at the end of this post.
The original story of the wooden puppet who comes to life was written by an Italian, Carlo Collodi, in the late 1800’s. His tale is considerably darker than the Disney version. Pinocchio is downright nasty! He kills Jiminy Cricket! With a hammer! (The cricket reappears as a ghost later on in the story.) There’s a lot of violence in the original that doesn’t appear in the film: Pinocchio goes to sleep with his feet propped up on the stove and wakes up to find that they’ve burned off; Geppetto makes him some new ones. Pinocchio bites off a cat’s front paw when the cat is disguised as a bandit. At one point Pinocchio is being hanged, but apparently he’s taking too long to die and so his would-be murderers, the cat and the fox, wander off. The Turquoise/Azure/Blue Fairy rescues him. And so on.
Since I’m always so fascinated with origin stories, I’m going to quote a rather long section from Smithsonian magazine about how (perhaps) Collodi got at least the germ of his plot:
Well, I guess we have to take the composer at his word, since he starts out like this:
