Its a Sunday to welcome back Rev Adam and to welcome Sheila Brown to the organ as well. (Bon Voyage, Linda! Send us a post card!) So lets thank God through song ... #11 “The Lord’s my Shepherd” (Crimond) W: Psalm 23, paraphrase: Scottish Psalter 1650 M: Jessie Seymour Irvine (1836-1887) It’s only in the last few centuries that rearing sheep meant big flocks with an almost adversarial relationship between shepherd/sheepdog and the sheep. In earlier times, flocks were small, and the sheep willingly followed their shepherd who protected,fed them, and knew each by name. Psalm 23 drew on this to illustrate the relationship between God and his people. It’s loved equally by both Jews and Christians; it’s apparently part of the Jewish third Shabbat meal. Both faiths favour the psalm for funerals ... and it was certainly the first one some of us learned in Sunday School! “The Lord is my shepherd” has been set to music by some major musicians – from Bach to Bernstein – and references to it can be heard on albums by Duke Ellington, The Grateful Dead, and Kanye West ... to name a few. Jessie Seymour Irvine was an amateur composer who wrote ‘in the Scottish tradition’. That is, English composers of the time were writing specific tunes to specific words. In Scotland, however, the tradition was to write tunes to a certain meter, so you could interchange verses with tunes according to your taste. Jessie was the daughter of a Church of Scotland minister who served in Crimond, Aberdeenshire; she wrote it while still in her teens! https://youtube/watch?v=eQ0Mh6E1vuU
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 01:40:19 +0000
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