Entertaiment

‘Oh, What Songs of the Heart’
By Laurie Williams Sowby

Latter-day Saints the world over sing “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” a hymn that urged the pioneers onward in their westward trek some 160 years ago. They’ve come to claim it as their own — ever since William Clayton got word of his wife Diantha’s safe delivery of their son in Nauvoo as he traveled west without her. “All is well, all is well, all is well!” he declared.

In truth — and as was the case with many early LDS hymns–Clayton penned the new words to a popular hymn of the time, titled “All is Well.” The hymn has enjoyed a revival in this century, as the Protestant New Church Hymnal (Lexicon Music, 1976) has carried it on its pages for nearly three decades now.

And Richard H. Cracroft knows the Protestant text.

As a former LDS bishop, stake president and mission president, he also knows that it takes 12 minutes to sing the authentically original LDS hymn, “The Spirit of God” — a useful bit of knowledge if you’re in charge of the meeting, he notes.

Cracroft has made a hobby of researching Mormon hymns. (He indicates his experiences as the loudest singer in Primary and junior Sunday school qualify him.)

The retired BYU English professor, now the Nan Osmond Grass Professor in English Emeritus, served as department chair, then dean of the College of Humanities before being named director of the school’s Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature. He has authored the Alumni Book Nook column for BYU’s alumni magazine since 1991.

His informative and entertaining paper “`Oh, What Songs of the Heart’: Zion’s Hymns as Sung by the Pioneers” appears in Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everyday Life of Utah’s Mormon Pioneers, published by BYU Studies in 1999.

According to Cracroft, the earlier Protestant version of “All is Well” which Clayton adapted was a so-called “`white spiritual’ of the dying Christian type.”

“Weep not my friends, weep not for me,” it said. “All is well, all is well.”

But Clayton’s version was more upbeat. “`Come, Come, Ye Saints’ not only encourages the Saints along the Oregon Trail to `gird up your loins, fresh courage take,'” he says, quoting the LDS hymn, “but it describes the mythic moral and spiritual journey of every Latter-day Saint . . . out of Babylon to Zion.”

He notes how the new Protestant adaptations have changed “We’ll find the place which God for us prepared/ Far away in the West” to read: “God hath prepared a glorious home above/ Round his throne, for His own/ Where they can rest forever in His love/ Toil and tears all unknown.”

Hymns unify people and espouse religious doctrine, regardless of the denomination. But hymn singing served several other important purposes for early Latter-day Saints, Cracroft explains.

“The hymns of the pioneer Saints spoke directly to them in tones, accents and images which describe their daily lives, recent history, tribulations as a people, and their faith in God,” he says.

“Hymns helped the Mormon pioneers to see their lives as Children of God who were fulfilling ancient prophecy, building Zion, and making meaningful sacrifices for the kingdom of God.”

“The hymns as sung by the pioneers meant something compellingly different to them than the same hymns mean to us or will mean to our great-grandchildren,” he notes. “Our children will not sing them the way we do. Each generation has its own take on these songs.”

For instance, he points out, many of the early LDS hymns were related to Saints’ persecutions, particularly in Missouri.

“Praise to the Man” was sung as a slow funeral dirge by Latter-day Saints who had actually known the Prophet Joseph Smith and could picture him in their mind’s eye and “bring to the hymn immediacy and grief — emotions not as possible 160 years after the tragedy at Carthage,” Cracroft explains.

Even though LDS members sing the same hymns today, the pioneer Saints “did it with an immediacy, fervor, expectancy, faith and confidence” that seems “comparatively more subdued, less confident, less sure of the imminence of Christ’s Second Coming, more jaded by the insistent incursions into faith of a secular and materialistic world . . . and certainly more mainline Christian,” says Cracroft.

The hymns of Latter-day Saints have always been crucial to the spiritual expression of individual members as well as the collective expression of the Mormon people, he adds. “Hymns provide that spiritual and cultural glue which has congealed the Latter-day Saints into a people.”

In addition, for the early Saints, “Their `songs of the heart’ helped bring their Zion cause, their people’s turbulent past, their formidable present, and their visionary destiny into Saintly focus.”

Cracroft says Saints today can sing with that same fervor and conviction.

“Even without the immediacy of experiencing the Prophet Joseph Smith or the persecutions at Far West, we sing the hymns with the sense of history. We sing with a knowledge of all that has occurred to shape the modern church – and it gives me, at least, a big lump in my throat to see the hand of the Lord in shaping the destiny of the Latter-day Saints.”

**To order Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everday Life of Utah’s Pioneers, visit www.byustudies.byu.edu, Click on books, then alphabetical listing. Edited by Ronald W. Walker and Doris Dant, the 512-page volume is $27.95 in hard cover. Immediately below on the site are listings for a related book, No Toil nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton, by James B. Allen (2002, 454 pages, $20.95 in hard cover and $19.95 in soft.)