During February, Black History Month, we are celebrating each week the contribution African Americans have made to our worship either in our hymns, anthems, preludes or postludes, through musical compositions and/or texts rooted in this history and culture.

For this final Sunday our music list includes the Hymn of the Day and Communion hymns.

Hymn of the Day: “We’ve Come This Far By Faith” (ELW 633)
Text: Albert A. Goodson, 1933-2003
Tune: THIS FAR BY FAITH, Albert A. Goodson

In the mid-twentieth century, Chicago was a major hub of African American gospel music with the presence of composer and publisher of African American gospel music Kenneth Morris and gospel performers Sallie Martin (1896-1988), Thomas A. Dorsey (1899-1993), Roberta Martin (1907-1969), Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland (1931-1991), and others. Albert A. Goodson was one of the gospel artists that established Los Angeles as a center of gospel music in the African American tradition.

The first publication of the song was as a choral octavo in 1956. The first album released by Voices of Hope in 1960 included Goodson’s “We’ve Come This Far by Faith” under the direction of Thurston G. Frazier. Though Frazier is listed as the arranger of the music as found in Songs of Zion, one will recognize his influence only on the choral parts.

African American gospel music scholar Horace Clarence Boyer indicates the significance of this hymn in African American worship by observing that many congregations in this era began worship with “We’ve Come This Far by Faith” as the processional and concluded worship with Thomas A. Dorsey’s “God Be with You”. The song was composed during the brief time after Goodson moved from Los Angeles to Chicago: “I was living in Chicago, alone. I was never married, and I didn’t have a relative or a close friend in that city. I became very discouraged. One day, during a depressed state, I sat down at the piano in a friend’s home and began to play a melody running through my mind. As I played the Lord seemed to speak to me saying, ‘We’ve come this far by faith. . .’”

A composer of other songs, Goodson was surprised at the song’s success: “I never thought my song would be a hit, because it sounded like a Sunday School song to me. But it just seemed to take immediately. People started singing it everywhere. I just couldn’t believe it. . . . And I’ve written other songs but they have never done what that song has done.

Finally, the song has had “crossover” appeal with white congregations in a gospel quartet version. Earlier, this hymn appeared only in African American hymnals. It now is included in recent mainline hymnals such as Chalice Hymnal (1995), Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), Glory to God (2013), and the bilingual hymnal Santo, Santo, Santo / Holy, Holy, Holy (2019).

Organ Voluntaries: “Aberystwyth”
Opening: Gerald Near (1942)
Closing: Healey Willan (1880–1968)

Aberystwyth" is a hymn tune composed by Joseph Parry, written in 1876 and first published in 1879 in Edward Stephen's Ail Lyfr Tonau ac Emynau. Parry was at the time the first professor and head of the new department of music at the recently founded University College Wales, Aberystwyth, now called Aberystwyth University. “ABERYSTWYTH”, most often set to “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” is used in over 300 hymnals world wide.

Gerald Near, one of the foremost composers of church music writing today, first studied theory and composition with Leslie Bassett, organ with Robert Glasgow, and conducting with Elizabeth Green at the University of Michigan. He later returned for graduate study in composition with Dominick Argento and conducting with Thomas Lancaster at the University of Minnesota. In 1982 Near was one of the first recipients of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. That year also saw the performance of two commissioned works for the AGO National Convention in Washington, DC. The following year he moved to Dallas, where he was appointed organist/choirmaster, and subsequently, Canon Precentor of St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

James Healey Willan was an Anglo-Canadian organist and composer. Willan composed some 800 musical pieces, the majority sacred works for choir such as anthems, hymns and mass settings. He is best known for his church music.

Willan’ s works show evidence of his love for plainsong and Renaissance music. For example, many of his liturgical compositions employ western church modes from a thousand years ago and the modality and harmony of late nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox music. His lines are significantly more melismatic, more contrapuntal and rhythmically much freer than was the case in the liturgical music of his contemporaries. His is an individual and original voice within a basically traditional English style.

When the Order of Canada was established in 1967, it named Willan a Companion. In Britain, it was customary for the Archbishop of Canterbury to occasionally grant very distinguished English cathedral musicians the Lambeth Doctorate, Mus. D Cantuar; in 1956 Willan, "the Dean of Canadian composers" became the first non-English church musician to be so honored; subsequently, many Canadian universities followed suit. Willan was one of the first Canadian musicians to appear on a Canadian postage stamp. It was not lost on young Canadian musicians that Willan was able to make his livelihood as a composer, and that being a composer was something to which they might realistically aspire. Willan would describe his provenance "English by birth; Canadian by adoption; Irish by extraction; Scotch by absorption”.

There are 99 published chorale preludes by Healey Willan, however most of them are not Lutheran in origin.

Offertory: “Let Nothing Ever Grieve Thee” Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Brahms's “Sacred Song” (Geistliches Lied) Op. 30 was composed in 1856 and takes the form of a double canon setting a text by Paul Fleming (1609–1640), starting with the line 'Let nothing ever grieve thee'. The English translation is by Walter E. Buszin who notes that there is much similarity between this work and the composer's German Requiem.

Let nothing ever grieve thee, distress thee, nor fret thee; heed God's good will, my soul, be still, compose thee.
Why brood all day in sorrow? tomorrow will bring thee God's help benign and grace sublime in mercy.
Be true in all endeavor, and ever do bravely; what God decrees brings joy and peace, He'll stay thee.
Amen.