September 14, 2014 - Picnic Service

The Love of God - F.H. Lehman

He's Just the Same Today - Elwood Denson

The Love of God - V.B. Ellis

Hymns: If You Believe, Old 100th, Go Down Moses

This week’s music is centered around Southern Singing Convention style Shape Note Music. This is what I grew up on.  I was first exposed to this by my oldest brother who somehow encountered the early Bill Gaither Homecoming videos and brought them home for my parents and I to watch. This was the first time that I really experienced people singing in harmony and doing counterpoint. As a more educated musician I can now see the more rudimentary nature of this counterpoint but it was the first time that I personally experienced parts moving in separate directions. The first time that I realized what a group of singers was truly capable of.

As a teenager I attended the Stamps Baxter School of Music. For three years I attended Ben Speer’s Music School in Nashville and learned about theory and harmony and sight singing and conducting taught by such gospel greats as the Speer Family. It was here that I learned the seven note shape note system where each note in the scale has a different shape. This was designed to help teach sight reading to people that had no experience singing at all and is a really interesting system of music education that expands upon the four note Sacred Harp system of the 19^th century.

The gospel hymn The Love of God by F. H. Lehman is an early example of convention style singing. This hymn describes God’s love from the perspective of god’s unfathomable love. The third verse which we will be performing as the benediction was not written by Lehman but was written on the wall of an asylum. It is a beautiful poetic explanation of the infinite nature of God’s love.

He’s Just the Same Today was written by Elwood Denson, a cousin of the Gospel pioneers, the Speer Family. This piece in the style of a fast gospel song tells the story of three Old Testament heroes, Moses, Daniel, and David. This song reminds us that the same God that did all of these miracles in the Bible is that same God that we worship today.

Vesphew Benton Ellis (1917-1988) a Church of God minister and member of the Southern Gospel Hall of Fame (2001) wrote a number of gospel songs. His setting of The Love of God has been recorded by a number of gospel groups including the Stamps Quartet. This piece gives the altos a chance to take the lead. In quartet style music the “soprano” line was sung by the lead of the quartet. The female singers (if there were any) sang the alto line otherwise this was sung the by the first tenor. This is considered the standard for “Quartet style singing.” As a student at Stamps Baxter I sang alto and got to sing all of the best parts. This piece offers a view that is very similar to the Lehman but musically shows one of the styles that was very typical of convention music, a slow six eight with an alto melody which was prevalent in a great deal of the more “sentimental” songs.

These pieces tie together in that they all show the love of God, either through explicit explanation or through the works of God in the Old Testament. These are a testimony to the love that God has for his people and fits well with the text for the day. A nice way to get back into the season, by focusing on the essence of our faith.