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The tune authority for IVERSON quotes The Psalter Hymnal Handbook as saying "its original melody line was altered in 1929 (see above)", but when I raise my eyes "above" I don't see any explanation of the alteration.
What comes to my mind is the change from "fall fresh" to "fall afresh" or vice versa, but I have no idea which came first.
Whence cometh my help?
Comments
IVERSON
The Handbook to the Baptist Hymnal (1992) explains that "Spirit of the Living God" was first printed privately on broadsheets in 1926. In 1929, Robert Coleman included it in his Revival Songs, with changes to the melody and without crediting Iverson. Baptists continued to print the song in this manner until the 1960's when someone contacted the Southern Baptist church music department and notified them of the problem. The attribution was corrected in subsequent publications, but the melody has remained in its 1929 form in all Southern Baptist hymnals. I haven't done enough research on this to know when IVERSON was first printed as Iverson intended it, so if anyone has that tidbit of information I would like to see it. (Iverson was Presbyterian, so that would be a good place to start)
Chris
Is this the change?
I'm a Northern Baptist, but I think I first learned this song in a Presbyterian context. Here is a link to a comparison between the first half of the melody line from the Baptist Hymnal 2008 page scan (top staff, black), and what I learned (bottom staff, blue). (The difference also applies to the last two measures of the song. I originally learned the "afresh" version shown here, which is most like the United Methodist Hymnal page scan, but I have also sung it to this the "fresh" version, as in the African American Heritage Hymnal page scan. I have never sung it (nor to my recollection heard it) sung to what apparently is the Coleman alteration (though the BH2008 credits McKinney with the arrangement), and I've never even seen let alone sung the version in the gray Psalter Hymnal, where the contours of the end of the first half and the end of the second half differ.
If it was published ca. 1926, how does it come to have a 1935 copyright date? I would have thought that publishing it on (anonymous?) song sheets for distribution at a revival would have thrust it boldly and bodily into the public domain.