Primary School Hymns

[The Boston Crab]

I'll just throw it out there, it's been in mind for quite a while.

One thing I truly miss about school is the communal singing, even though at the time I felt it was frequently a chore. I'd go so far as to say that as I've grown older and obtained more freedom to distance myself from the things I don't want to do, I've gradually lost something. Of course, with freedom I've gained an enormous amount of other good stuff but the fact remains: singing those bright and breezy pagan hymns at the top of my voice, whilst feigning reluctance, surrounded by my equally ambivalent little pals - it's the kind of thing I expect will bring a tear to my eye before I die (not screaming like my passengers).

Like many on here, music has been a constant source of joy and excitement in my life. I love trying to dissect and deconstruct something that is ultimately completely intangible and constantly defies any attempt to pin it down. Yes, you can intellectualise about what circumstances bore its creation, the mental state and character of the composer, its derivations and so on. Ultimately, all that matters are the feelings created by these vibrations. It's fucking magic. As well as the songs that my mum sang to me as a baby, it's these primary school songs which opened my ears.

I'd say the best-remembered one for me, and probably many on here, is 'Autumn Days' by Estelle White. A fairly sentimental appreciation of beauty in life's details and the importance of not taking this for granted. I'm sure someone could quite easily try to rip it apart but the verse melody and lyric are worthwhile contributions to human civilisation. It might be a little trite now but I think that it's good for children to enjoy some bold strokes of positivity before the daily drudge. I also remember a bit of a jazzy Harvest Festival number which ran through descriptions of various fruit and veg with a repeated 'the apples are ripe, the plums are red, broad beans are sleepin' in a blankety bed!'

The more overtly religious stuff also affected me quite a lot but I find that may be due to indoctrination and religious shame. Something like 'Lord of the Dance' has a fantastic rousing melody (borrowed I just found from a Shaker hymn) but the lyric is a little heavy. Even now, when I think about it, I feel I could shed a tear at the line 'they buried my body and they thought I'd gone but I am the dance and I still go on.' I'm not sure if it's religious programming, if I just find the sentimentailty so affecting or the philosophical idea of "keep on keepin' on".

I also have fondness for the tunes 'Give Me Oil In My Lamp' and 'One More Step Along The World I Go'.

Any room for discussion here?

[the midnight watch baboon]

We all had to sing along to a song that extolled the virtues of various musical instruments, with the line 'The horn, the horn, it wakes me at dawn' being particularly memorable.

Besides that and the usual Kum By Yah stuff the only other song I recall had the solemn lyrics, 'Pioners must work every day, from dawn 'til set of sun; From dawn 'til set of sun, a day's work must be doneeee'

Forsythian syntax in action.

[James "End-To-End" Benton]

I'm sure I remember one of the many Dawkins threads taking in religious indoctrination, with one poster mentioning that they'd been educated at an atheist school and had to sing songs about getting ready for a party and suchlike. I wish I could find that poster and tell them how lucky they were. My favourite hymn was the only one which made no mention of God's boundless mercy, of the loving sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ, or even of the need "to say a great big thank you", but went on about vernacular forms of architecture (No.61 in Come And Praise):

All over the world
Everywhere
Where the sun shines
And where the white snow gleams
In the green green forests and by the streams
Hands are busy, plans are made
And slowly, slowly, somewhere somebody's house is made

Everybody's building
Everybody's building
Everybody's building day by day
Everybody's building
Everybody's building
Everybody's building in a different way

[Lolinurse]

Ahh yes, school hymns, the few positive memories of school my friends and I agree upon. Most pleasantly we sang this particular hymn every year on the last day of summer term throughout primary, shell and secondary school, and then some of us went on to sing it at the end of Trinity for three more years:

Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing;
Fill our hearts with joy and peace;
Let us each Thy love possessing,
Triumph in redeeming grace.
O refresh us, O refresh us,
Traveling through this wilderness.

Thanks we give and adoration
For Thy Gospel's joyful sound;
May the fruits of Thy salvation
In our hearts and lives abound.
Ever faithful, ever faithful,
To the truth may we be found.

So that when Thy love shall call us,
Savior, from the world away,
Let no fear of death appall us,
Glad Thy summons to obey.
May we ever, may we ever,
Reign with Thee in endless day.

[youtube=425,344]KUU6C7pOw8s[/youtube]

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

"If I had a Hammer"

[Melody Lee]

We used to sing a couple of the hymns mentioned, though we also used to sing a few Beatles songs too - Octopus's Garden, Penny Lane, Lady Madonna, Yesterday and once, I'm sure, we had a go at I Am The Walrus. I remember Octopus's Garden sounding really quite lovely being sung by a couple of hundred kids in the (slightly) larger, echoey upper phase assembly hall. I don't really remember the learning of the songs though, it makes me wonder how easy or difficult it was for the teachers to get us started on anything.

Other non-hymn songs we used to sing - Right Said Fred (the Bernard Cribbins song, not 'I'm Too Sexy', obviously), and 'When I was a boy on the Isle of Wight...' - not sure if that's the title, but it's the opening lyric - can't find anything of it on google.

I never used to sing myself, I'd move my mouth but didn't actually sing. My friend Adrian used to nudge me and threaten to blow my cover. Git. I find it harder to remember the hymns we sang, apart from the obvious ones... they made less of an impression on me, though our hymn books (red and blue covers, did everyone else have those?) had all sorts of interesting paintings in different styles accompanying the hymns. Some of them were vaguely gruesome, though thats just a vague impression. Some of them we never sang, and I'd flip to those pages as they had some mildly disturbing, dream-like pictures.
Accompanying Kumbaya (I think) was Salvador Dali's 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross'. I thought that was pretty amazing.

[Phil_A]

I always liked "In The Bleak Midwinter", but then that was just a Christina Rossetti poem set to music.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx1JANgX2qw

[trotsky assortment]

In keeping with the first tagger, the first thing which came to my mind was 'Sing Hosanna to the king!'  (of Keynes).

My strongest memories of that one are:
- everyone singing 'of Keynes' instead of kings, as being 5, we genuinely thought the word was keynes - despite having no knowledge of Milton Keynes.  Actually, was there such a place in the late 70s?
- singing the extra 'of keynes' at the end of the line which should end '...to the king.'

[JesusAndYourBush]

At our primary school they put up all the words to the hymns on an overhead projector.  The writing was usually faded and hard to read, the first verse starting off in big capitals, each successive verse getting smaller as whoever wrote it realised they wouldn't be able to fit everything on, the last verse being in tiny spidery writing and unreadable.

One thing we used to sing was "There was an old man named Michael Finnegan" and we sang the same verse over and over again until the teacher stopped us.  At the start of assembly someone would ask if we could sing michael finnegan and the teacher would always say "I'll let you sing it later if you're good" or something, and then near the end of assembly to much cheering we'd be allowed to sing the song.  Everyone seemed to love it but I found it totally and utterly tedious.

Ha, just saw the "o come let us adore him" tag.  Yeah we sang that, with each time the phrase was repeated we'd have to sing it louder, with most of us taking the piss by shouting it the 3rd time at the top of our voices.

[PaulTMA]

In 6th year we got to sing Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everybody', which descended into "IT'S CHRIST-MASSS!" farce at every chorus.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

By the age of 10 we were really wringing the sexual immaturity value over "Go Do It On The Mountain"

We were ten of course, but in case that excuse wasn't good enough, we were relieved it allowed us to completely undermine its call for mass indoctrination.

The second line of Go Do It On The Mountain is "over the hills and everywhere"

PHWOAR

[non capisco]

We used to sing a couple of the hymns mentioned, though we also used to sing a few Beatles songs too  I'm sure, we had a go at I Am The Walrus.

Get the fuck outta here - really? I'd love to have seen our music teacher getting us to sing 'yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye'.

We had that jaunty 'The ink is black/The page is white/Together we learn to read and write' song. And 'At half past three/We go home to tea/Or maybe at quarter to four' which seemed sarcastic seeing as our school didn't let anyone out til 5.

[SOTS]

At the start of primary school for me it was mostly religious songs on the most part, but  I found that throughout my time there, songs gradually started to get less and less religious as it went on. More songs about friendship and stuff, mostly due to a lot of the kids not being particularly religious and wanting to be a tad more secular.

To the point where this was the lyrics to a song we sang:
"I did it, I did it
I didn't think I could
I did it, I did it,
I never thought I would,
But I tried and I tried and then in the eeeeend,
I did it, I did it and now i'll do it again,
YES!"

I was in about... primary 6 (10 or 11 years old) when they brought this song in, providing much hilarity for us and the other slightly older kids. I can't find reference to the song anywhere online though!

I also had a soft spot for the school song we used to sing every year for the Braw Lad's visit (a tradition in our town that occurs just before the Summer Holidays:

"Balmoral Balmoral, the Queen of the Borders,
Our school so beloved by many a year,
To all now a symbol of knowleeeeeeedge and order,
To raise all our hopes and to calmall our fears."

I can't remember the second verse aside from the third line:
"They come in the school with their young heeeeeeeearts a'burnin..."

I wish I could find the rest online somewhere.

[TVs Nick Wealthall]

Fuck almost tangible nostalgia from that first tag. Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning...

The other one I remember was a harvest festival one which I only remembered the first two lines from but the internet says the whole thing is:

Michaelmas daisies purple in the border,
big fat leeks all standing up in order.
Whiskered barley talking to the breeze
Low hung boughs of laden apple trees

Chugging engines ready for the reeping
Pounds of chutney labled for the keeping
Giant marrows winning every prize,
Bubbling jars of elderberry wine.

Fruits are bottled, others in the deep-freeze,
Silken poppies blushing in the cornfields.
DON'T BRING MUDDY BOOTS INTO THE HALL,
Golden Onions hanging on a wall.

It's harvest time,
Harvest time again.
Harvest time,
Give thanks for sun and rain.

A time to take
and a time to give
Harvest time, it's the time to live

At harvest time.....
Mellow, fruitful harvest time.

[alan nagsworth]

Don't drop that can, Stan!
Don't waste that pack, Jack!
With just a little bit of common sense,
We can make it riiiiiiight!

No one else remember that one? The woman who did our assemblies was a right fucking hippie.

[The Masked Unit]

Fantastic thread! Several of my favourites have been listed already - Autumn days and Oil in my lamp especially (and yes, I think the additional ...OF KINGS! is a universal phenomenon!). I'm just about as anti-religion as you can get and generally believe that it should be kept out of schools, but would be devestated that my children were robbed of such an uplifting activity.

We also did at least one Beatles number (Yesterday), along with a couple classics that haven't been mentioned already: "When I needed a neighbour" was always a snigger-fest due to the line, "I was cold, I was naked, were you there, were you there?" and one which I presume is called "Cross over the road my friend" which featured the line "Cross over the road my friend, ask the lord his strength to lend", which we sang as "Strength to bend" (i.e. strength to be gay).

On a related note, it always bugs me how you're meant to sing hymns at church weddings and funerals, despite not knowing the tune of the song and the pacing of the words etc. Only the bloody church would make you sing a song you'd never heard before, without even giving you a preview first, in public, the sods.

Edit: At the risk of spawnin a thousand nostalgia threads, I'm tempted to start one about country dancing. I wont, but I'm tempted.

[Doctor Stamen]

20-25 years on, I can still hear a handful of kids singing "...of kings" in error.

[The Masked Unit]

20-25 years on, I can still hear a handful of kids singing "...of kings" in error.

I think it was one of the earliest examples I can think of where I thought "Why are people so fucking stupid that they can't get something so simple right?" I've been a misanthrope ever since.

[no_offenc]

By the age of 10 we were really wringing the sexual immaturity value over "Go Do It On The Mountain"

We were ten of course, but in case that excuse wasn't good enough, we were relieved it allowed us to completely undermine its call for mass indoctrination.

The second line of Go Do It On The Mountain is "over the hills and everywhere"

PHWOAR

Of course, you realise that song was actually called "Go TELL It On The Mountain".

Were you all hard of hearing?

[fbb bastard]

Don't drop that can, Stan!
Don't waste that pack, Jack!

sounds like the lyrics paul simon felt were too obvious for "50 ways to leave your lover" as well.

we had to endure "annies song" by the denver on a weekly basis at our school as a non-hymn hymn. some wags would change "night in the forest" with "shite". crazzzzzyyyyy guys!!!!

[Artemis]

I wasn't really into the old hymns as such, but the dynamic of singing with a group of people who are completely taken with what they're singing about, to the point that it stops becoming a bunch of people all singing the same tune, and starts to become a collective outpouring of emotion, is one of the things I truly miss about my religious days. It had a power to it that I've not encountered else where.

A lot of the tunes are simple, too; both musically and lyrically. I pretty much learnt to play piano by joining in with songs like these, especially during the parts where the singing stopped but the music continued, as people ad-libbed their songs and expressed themselves individually to the basic chord structure of the tune. The key was to make it faintly anthemic, and when it worked it really did work. I still have trouble working out whether or not I love these tunes so much because they're great tunes, or whether they're so tied up with a chapter of my life that I have a bit of rose-tinted view.

Here are a couple of examples: this first one is just a genuinely pretty song, from the Hillsongs stable, written and sung by Darlene Zschech. It's so good, not so long ago it was covered by finalists on an American Idol show, too.

[youtube=425,350]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=tblpN1IJtZk[/youtube]

Closer to home, the group Delirious? have belted out many a Christian anthem. Here's a fairly recent one:

[youtube=425,350]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vNjH8QDpBFY[/youtube]

Again, I love these tunes. I don't think they can be judged as 'tunes' as much as pieces of music that draw people together in one voice.

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

"Lord I Love To Watch Things Fly" was an odd one - it's an ode to man's invention and inquisitiveness and therefore more humanist than a hymn should be.

I could only find one link on google - so this may not be well-known:

Lord, I love to watch things fly
Whizzing, zooming, flashing by;
Engines, aircraft, speedboats, cars,
Spacecraft shooting to the stars

Lord, I love to probe and pry,
Seeking out the reason why;
Looking inside things and out,
Finding what they're all about

Lord, I'm many things and one,
Though my life's not long begun;
You alone my secret see,
What I am cut out to be

And of course, I changed the last one in the first line to "die".

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

And there was this hymn which always seemed downbeat and miserablist to me, despite the final couple of lines in each verse.  I attribute my liking of Radiohead and Spiritualised to this hymn:


think of a world without any flowers
think of a world without any trees
think of a sky without any sunshine
think of the air without any breeze
we thank you lord, for flowers trees and sunshine
we thank you lord, and praise your holy name.

think of a world without any animals
think of a field without any herd
think of a stream without any fishes
think of a dawn without any bird
we thank you lord, for all your living creatures
we thank you lord, and praise your holy name.

think of a world without any people
think of a street with no-one living there
think of a town without any houses
no-one to love and nobody to care
we thank you lord, for families and friendships
we thank you lord, and praise your holy name.

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7fu0ulzS7M[/youtube]

[jaydee81]

'I was cold I was naked'

Heehee

[Tokyo Sexwhale]

Were you there? Were you there?

[ozziechef]

Autumn Days. Best Hymn ever.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

'I was cold I was naked'

Heehee

I was going to post that one.

"Shine Jesus shine" was a favourite too.

[jaydee81]

Autumn Days. Best Hymn ever.

Ooo I was going to post about that but forgot what it was called. That was the new-agey one that got introduced in the late 80s isn't it?
I was thinking about it the other day as I can't remember ever seeing grass that was 'jewelled' or a 'jet plane waiting in the air to be refuelled.'

[AnthonyJ]

In keeping with the first tagger, the first thing which came to my mind was 'Sing Hosanna to the king!'  (of Keynes).

My strongest memories of that one are:
- everyone singing 'of Keynes' instead of kings, as being 5, we genuinely thought the word was keynes - despite having no knowledge of Milton Keynes.  Actually, was there such a place in the late 70s?
- singing the extra 'of keynes' at the end of the line which should end '...to the king.'

We used to sing "Sing Huw Hannan to the king" as there was a boy called Huw Hannon in our class and it really scanned well - his dad was a political journalist on the BBC called Patrick Hannan who did something political and comedy based on Radio 4 many years ago.

[NoSleep]

I used to love singing in Primary School and some of the hymns had great tunes. i don't recognise some of the titles mentioned above so I assume the School Hymn book has been updated from my years. My absolute favourite was "Jerusalem" with words by William Blake of course, but what great tune as well. I really did love singing: the kids stood next to me would often turn their heads in amazement that I was so rapt in the process. I also made into the choir of the local church, which was less fun as it called for rehearsals and ate into valuable free time. The singing in school was another thing: something fun for 20 mins before lessons.

I do remember we were rehearsed Benjamin Britten's Old Abram Brown, which culminated in a visit to a large hall filled with kids from all the other local schools all performing this together: what a great thing to be part of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhzI1OOmDhE