
Does the “All Night Vigil” Last All Night?

What a wonderful message is contained in this song! Let me answer the question above first, and then I’ll cover some other issues. So the Hebrew words “Hine ma tov uma naim shevet achim gam yachad” are from Psalm 133 in the Hebrew Bible. I have always loved this psalm, and since the entire thing is so short I’m quoting it in full:
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!
It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments;
As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore. (KJV)
No. Your shinbone is named after an ancient Greek wind instrument, sort of like a flute.
Everybody got that? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m very distractible. So it’s good for me to get that out of the way. What does “tibi” mean? Basically, “to you.” Latin nouns and pronouns have various forms that determine their use in a sentence so that you don’t have to use a preposition. And you don’t have to worry about word order. You just have to learn all six types (called “cases”) of nouns and pronouns. Then you have to learn tense, voice and mood for each verb, and degrees of comparison for each adjective . . . and don’t get me started on the adverbs. It’s very complicated. How did the Romans have time to conquer the world when they had to learn all this grammar? Beats me.
So, last night we had the family over to watch the Broncos win over the Chargers (this post was originally written in October 2016), and I was telling my father-in-law about my choir’s upcoming Christmas concert with the Denver Brass, and how they’d be playing with us for the Rutter Gloria, among other pieces, and since he’s a former brass player himself he was quite interested. He looked through the copy I had sitting on the coffee table, taking note of the instrumentation, and then he read the intro material. “Guess where this was first performed?” he asked. “Somewhere in England,” I said. “Nope. Omaha, Nebraska.”
Maybe! The song may have been in the public domain since 1973. It’s one of those interesting but meandering stories that’s hard to untangle. The short version is that Woody Guthrie wrote the song in 1940 but didn’t copyright it until 1945. That original copyright was never renewed and so therefore would have expired 28 years later. But in 1956 Ludlow Music, which seems to have been Guthrie’s publisher, filed for its own copyright and apparently did keep it up to date. Why two simultaneous copyrights were allowed isn’t clear. So earlier this year the same law firm that successfully sued to get “Happy Birthday” put in the public domain tried to do the same with “This Land.” (You missed that breaking news about “Happy Birthday”? Tsk, tsk!) If the suit is successful, one requirement will be the refunding of all licensing fees paid since 2010.
Hoo boy. I seem to start out a number of these articls saying, “I’ve always vaguely thought . . . “ and then explaining why I was wrong. Well, here’s another one. I’ve always vaguely thought that “Oh Shenandoah” was about the Shenandoah River and/or Valley Didn’t you? The river with that name runs through the valley in Virginia and West Virginia, although it’s not a major one but instead a tributary of the Potomac. (There’s also a Shenandoah River in New Zealand, but we won’t worry about that one.) So my vague impression was that the speaker was from the Shenandoah Valley/River and loved that part of the country but he was having to leave it to cross the wide Missouri.
This is yet another of those songs everybody sings and nobody thinks about. Come on, now. Have you ever asked yourself this question? I sure hadn’t.
Once again my good friend Wikipedia put me onto the right track and I’ve gone on from there. As with so many wonderful songs that are entrenched in American music, this one stems from slave spirituals. And, as with the meaning of so many spirituals, it’s a mix of biblical and historical ideas.
When contemporary composer John Muehleisen set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” to music, he knew that the poet was not talking about actual weeping numbers in the first line, perhaps a number 7 with tears dripping from the end of the top bar. No. Here the word “number” means a piece, selection, or verse. When we refer to the songs in a Broadway show, for instance, we often call them “number,.” as in “a showstopping song-and-dance number.” Therefore, if we piece together the title, “A Psalm of Life,” the subtitle, “What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist,” and the first two lines (“Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream”), we get a message of hope, optimism, and action.
We know that any true folk song will always have multiple versions, since they weren’t composed in any formal way and were passed down orally for some time before being written. One aspect or the other of the original may be prominent in each variant. “Cindy” has an almost infinite variety of verses and also has the characteristic of having been built at least partly from “call and response,” which in this case has someone start out with a line and then others in the group have to come up with a second line that rhymes with the first, whether or not the lines add up to a coherent story. (This type of activity is also common in some churches in which the preacher says something that is clearly asking for a response, even if it’s just “amen.” My favorite such line is something I heard at a wedding I attended many years ago; when the preacher performing the ceremony started to feel that he wasn’t getting enough feedback, he’d say, “Am I talkin’ to anybody out there?” which would be greeted with a chorus of “amens.”)