how can I keep from singing...

[thanate]

I woke up yesterday morning with a handful of the words to "How can I Keep from Singing" stuck in my head, to the tune of Barbara Allen. This led me downstairs to the hymnal, which failed to have the actual tune. I've got the Baptist one, on the grounds that it's sufficiently ubiquitous that I picked it up at cheap-to-free, and thus it's probably widely available to others as well. Of course, it also confuses me when I look things up, as the only hymns I'm particularly familiar with are ones I met in the heavily bowdlerized form while singing in a Unitarian choir. At any rate, after looking up the entire lyrics in Rise Up Singing, the actual tune begins to come back to me since there are far too many words to fit into the other.

Meanwhile, the ubiquitous youtube presents me with a rather non-hymn-like Enya version, complete with astral photography. Quite peculiar.

At any rate, one of the things I did in process of cleaning up was to pull out and shelve all my music, and remember again how much I have of it. There's the stack of violin books about six inches tall on my new shelf, with etude books on top in the hopes that some day I'll actually take my violin out of the case and tune it and want something silly to play. (and there's the folder of gamba music at the bottom of the stack...) Which is all very well, but then there's a handful of guitar stuff (both mine-- beginning & classical, and grauwulf's chords & intro rock stuff), a pennywhistle book, a bag of clarinet stuff (although the clarinet is still with my parents) and a beginning piano book. And then there's nearly a whole shelf of miscellaneous vocal music with everything from ancient music to show tunes, but mostly early to mid 20th century songbooks. You'd think I would be doing more with some of this... I vaguely contemplate looking into the local barony's SCA ensemble, or possibly trying to track down three more of the appropriate sort of string players to make up a quartet.

It seems more likely, however, that I will end up sanding the staircase and trying to figure out what on my wist would give someone the idea that I wanted a pendant made of wired-together washers (so that I can remove it...) and mark a few pub sings onto the calendar.

Comments

[melaniesuzanne.livejournal.com]

Ah, I know only the Enya version. I didn't even realize that is a hymn.

[carthew.livejournal.com]

I don't know "Enya" but I know this: http://nethymnal.org/htm/h/c/hcaikeep.htm

I think of this as being one of the "Sacred Harp" pieces, but I might be wrong.

Beware: this site plays they midi as you enter the page. It's not work-friendly.