Hymn Singing - My Roots

[RZehr]

This year our family sang through the Church Hymnal, which is one of the hymnals that I grew up with. We kept track of which songs we knew, and just sang those. Turns out that we know 47% of them, 311/657.
Last year we did the Life Songs, which is another one we grew up with. That one we knew 63%, or 215/343.

I grew up with a similar tradition. We sang straight through the hymnal, even the unfamiliar songs. It sharpens your sight reading skills if nothing else.

Try that with the Christian Hymnary some time.

I have no attachment to that one, having never regularly attended a church where that was in the rack. Why that one?
I may try the Purple Martin on sometime, because it is in the pew at the church I am a member of now, but probably not in 2024.

[ken_sylvania]

I grew up with a similar tradition. We sang straight through the hymnal, even the unfamiliar songs. It sharpens your sight reading skills if nothing else.

Try that with the Christian Hymnary some time.

I have no attachment to that one, having never regularly attended a church where that was in the rack. Why that one?
I may try the Purple Martin on sometime, because it is in the pew at the church I am a member of now, but probably not in 2024.

Barnhart was saying how they sang even the unfamiliar songs. That's a challenging undertaking with some of the martyr songs in the Christian Hymnary. I can tell you, if you're not used to the old style of singing (think Amish church singing), it gets old really fast trying to sing a 35 verse song to that old music. Where the music is on one set of pages but the words are on the next couple of pages. And the whole song is a translation from an old German or Dutch hymn and has awkward phrasing and non-standard ryming because, well, because translating songs is tremendously hard work.

[QuietlyListening]

I grew up singing hymns and miss it very much. This fall I set up a hymn sing for our church and it ended up happening on the night we had an unexpected tropical storm and we still had an excellent turnout plus many either said- can we do that again I really enjoyed it or I couldn't make it but would love you to do this again so looks like in the new year I will be setting it up again.

I was pleased to see how many really enjoyed the hymns and it is interesting to see how many - in our fellowship which is not anabaptist- never grew up with hymns.

[barnhart]

This year our family sang through the Church Hymnal, which is one of the hymnals that I grew up with. We kept track of which songs we knew, and just sang those. Turns out that we know 47% of them, 311/657.
Last year we did the Life Songs, which is another one we grew up with. That one we knew 63%, or 215/343.

I grew up with a similar tradition. We sang straight through the hymnal, even the unfamiliar songs. It sharpens your sight reading skills if nothing else.

Try that with the Christian Hymnary some time.

No thanks. I know what's in the middle.

[Heirbyadoption]

This is a thread to share a link to or provide a sample of the type of hymn singing you had in your youth. For some it may be the same as you have now. For others of us it is a big change...Feel free to share a sample of the hymn singing you were raised in.

This first video is what we typically grew up with in our church services (my own congregation would have sang a good bit faster, but this is still representative of the typical). The minister would usually "line" each verse at a time before we sang it, a holdover from the days when people could not read as well or did not necessarily have hymnbooks.


This second one is more typical of our youth singings, both when I was younger and now. This was an evening at one of our annual conferences after worship services, just singing for the enjoyment of it.


Growing up, each of the congregations in our group would have a singing on a different Friday night to sing and then have ice cream and cookies. Our singing material ranged from old gospel songbooks like Jimmie Davis, Carols of Joy, the old blue Favorite Hymns, Songs of Faith & Praise, or even the Gaither's Hymns for the Family of God all the way over to a variety of Menno songbooks like Zion's Praises, Christian Hymnary, Echoes of Triumph, etc, or sometimes even the traditional metrical hymnbook without musical notation (the latter usually only in the most conservative congregations and from which the first video in this post is singing). Those evening are some of my best childhood memories, and gave me the love for music appreciation for hymnody that I have today.