Saturday night hymns

Hymnsinger, Cynthia Clawson

On August 17, 1990, fresh from graduate school, I joined a band on the Golden Odyssey, a sister ship to the aforementioned Royal Odyssey. The Golden Odyssey was docked in Venice, Italy, when I boarded her. Our first cruise took us to Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, Corfu, Greece, Istanbul, Turkey, Odessa and Yalta, USSR, Kusadasi, Turkey, and Athens, Greece. You don’t get the cultural and landscape diversity of South Dakota, but the food was a nice change.

One of the fellows in the revue group was named David. We often would share CD’s with each other. Two of the CD’s that he shared with me were by a Christian artist named Cynthia Clawson. More widely known in the 70’s and 80’s as a gospel singer, she and her husband are currently co-pastors at a church in Austin, TX, called The Sanctuary.

Ms. Clawson has a very respectable discography; 22 CD’s from 1977 through 2008. In 1988, Ms. Clawson recorded a pair of albums in which she allowed herself to be a little more artistically indulgent than she probably would have been otherwise. They are called Hymnsinger and Carolsinger. I shall tell you about Carolsinger at another time. I will tell you now, though, that Hymnsinger remains a cornerstone in my development as a church musician.

With archetypal and ageless hymns including “O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go”, “I Need Thee Every Hour”, “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence”, “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, and “When We All Get to Heaven”, Ms. Clawson brings us to a table of powerfully poetic representations of scripture and offers a measure of exotic flavor to savor with each portion. She paints a unique portrait of classic hymnody, where instead of dressing her subjects in their Sunday morning best, she escorts them around town in a limo dressed in their Saturday night snazziest. One is a Latin tune at a small bistro, another is an ardent torch song in a smoky club, yet one more is a chant in a cathedral where the echoes seem to reach back beyond epochs of church history to witness the very Sacrificial Lamb Himself and to offer a lament to soothe the pains of strife and grief.

Hymnsinger stretched my ears. It taught me how to observe a hymn tune at its basest and then trim it like a tree, sometimes sparingly, sometimes lavishly, giving it life, and allowing it to not only be different from each angle that we see it, but also to embellish or highlight a key phrase or verse. If the author of a hymn text has been true to scripture, then it can stand alone for all time. But musical styles are a bit more fleeting. The subjective nature of music allows us to adapt to appropriate styles of our times. And although the music of a hymn can be representational of the sentiments of a hymn, the music itself isn’t sacred. The Word of God is. All that’s required of music is that the Word of God is clothed in dignity.

Credits: Roger Hawk, for being patient with me when I needed to learn the basics of a new musical language. The people of Wallace Presbyterian Church, for purchasing a Steinway; and for scads of other things.