A couple of Tindley attribution problems in BOH2006

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Fri, 10/12/2012 - 03:22 — Haruo

I just got done linking the First Lines in Beams of Heaven (BOH2006) to their text authorities, and discovered a couple of questionable attributions and one place where two texts were commingled.

1. BOH2006 says "words and music, Charles A. Tindley" for #32 "Come, saints and sinners". However, this text (with minor variations) is attested from as early as 1811, and Tindley wasn't born until 1851. Is my comment in the "Note" field appropriate to deal with this issue? The tune may well be Tindley's; it's quite different from those attested (here and here) in the database's page scans.

2. BOH2006 says "words and music, Charles A. Tindley" for #40 "A Better Day Is Coming". However, this appears to be an elaboration (in a socially conscious, peace-and-justice-oriented way) of a text and tune apparently by Robert Lowry, a_better_day_is_coming_a_morning_promise, and I'm not sure either text or tune is divergent enough to warrant calling it a separate hymn. Also, there is a related text/tune, a_better_day_is_coming_a_morning_bright, which is variously ascribed to Jennie Stout and Charles Bentley. Any chance these are pseudonyms of each other? ;-)

Anyhow, I've done what I can to straighten them out (merged the Stout and Bentley instances, and reassigned one instance to Lowry).


Comments

Thu, 10/18/2012 - 15:07 — cfenner

1. In Tindley's publications, the authorship of both words and music are attributed to him; obviously the text is not his, but the tune is probably his. A note like what you have written would be more appropriate for the authority page.

2. In Tindley's New Songs of Paradise, No. 6, it indicates "This is an old song re-written by Rev. Chas. A Tindley, D.D." Yes, I would call it a separate hymn so we can track it separately, but the text authority for the Tindley version needs to include a note to the effect that it was based on Lowry's hymn, and perhaps also a link back to the Lowry authority.

(FYI, I am supposed to be indexing Tindley's publications for Hymnary, but progress has been slow.)

Fri, 11/02/2012 - 12:42 — Haruo

I changed the note to read "The first stanza and the refrain are slightly altered from Lowry's text. The second stanza retains only the opening line of Lowry's. Stanzas 2b through 4 appear to be Tindley's independent work." and will put it in the authority as well. Of course, a link would be helpful, but the Notes field is text only. (I still haven't figured out how the Southern Harmony's Full Text field manages to use < p > and other markups.)

See here and here for what I have just done with this.

The Bentley and Stout hymns with this first line appear to be less directly dependent on Lowry, though quite probably inspired by or based on his hymn in some manner and degree. The Collinge instance I can't judge. Where did DNAH find it? (WorldCat doesn't show a copy of Sing His Praises (1902) anywhere.

Thu, 11/08/2012 - 12:12 — cfenner

I modified some of your work. FYI, the Additional Information field contains HTML markup options.

Fri, 11/09/2012 - 10:55 — Haruo

You're the Tindley expert. I just got involved because I happened to have this Tindley book (Beams of Heaven) in My Hymnals (the Ann E. Beatty Memorial Hymnal Collection) that was not listed in the database until I "created" it, and entering its hymns in the database required that I try to make sense of what was already there.

I know Additional Information allows markup; I wish Notes and Full Text did. If I didn't use something along those lines it might be that I first entered the info in Notes and later decided it belonged in Add'l Info and just cut-and-pasted...

Tue, 11/13/2012 - 13:38 — cfenner

Thank you for adding Beams of Heaven, and all your hymnal work has helped to turn up inconsistencies in the database. Much appreciated.

Tue, 11/13/2012 - 20:28 — Haruo

Adding stuff to the hymnary.org database and polishing what's there is among my most favoritest hobbies!

Thu, 02/28/2013 - 12:04 — Haruo

I'm adding the tune info for BOH2006 #44 "There was Naaman the leper", and lo and behold I see that the hymn, which I think is Tindley's, is attested in an 1887 instance in "English and German Gospel Songs, or The Ebenezer Hymnal" (EGGS1887 #d252)! Could someone check this and see if it is really there, and if it is there, then whether it has the same refrain first line and whether it lists Tindley as the author, as the database says it does? I think this is highly unlikely. The question is rather, whether this is another case of Tindley resurrecting something from obscurity and making a tune for it, or whether there are two separate hymns that begin "There was Naaman the leper" (this is certainly possible), or what.

Rather bizarrely, when I search for a copy of EGGS1887 on WorldCat, the only hit is a 2000 issue of an Eliza Snow (LDS) CD! See!

Thu, 02/28/2013 - 12:08 — cfenner

This hymnal is at Newberry in Chicago and Southwestern Baptist Th. Sem. in Fort Worth, TX. I can probably get someone at SWBTS to look at this.

Thu, 02/28/2013 - 13:24 — Haruo

I am intrigued, however, by the supernal wrongness of the WorldCat search results.

Thu, 02/28/2013 - 13:31 — Haruo

In addition to what I mentioned (Who is listed as the author, and what is the first line of the refrain), it would be helpful to have the first stanza in its entirety and, if the Ebenezer Hymnal has music and they can read it, is it the same tune as I have indicated at BOH2006 #44 (Incipit 12333 32121 D6U11 23333)? Thanks!

Thu, 02/28/2013 - 14:00 — Haruo

to check the entire text. I've added the full text to BOH2006 #44. The odd punctuation (mainly periods where would would expect commas) is verbatim from the source. I would also note somewhere, though I'm not sure where or how is best, that "Syrian" in this text should be pronounced as a homophone of "Cyrene" (and the closing allusion in "just shoulder the cross" makes me wonder whether Tindley thought "Syrian" and "Cyrene" were just variant spellings of a single term).

Fri, 03/01/2013 - 09:27 — cfenner

In the 1887 Ebenezer Hymnal at SWBTS, the text is not attributed in any way, with no music (I will try to double check WorldCat to see if a music edition exists). In Tindley's works, the text is essentially the same, with words and music credited to him, copyright 1901. Is it possible that Tindley is the author of 1887? He was 36 at the time, so it's not out of the question. He started publishing his own collections in 1901 when he was 50. The delay may have been for lack of financial resources. I will try to read more on Tindley and see if I can find any indications that he wrote or sold some of his songs before 1901.

Fri, 03/01/2013 - 11:34 — Haruo

Interesting that there are two additional stanzas in the Ebenezer Hymnal. I wonder why they were excluded from Tindley's published version. The (minor) changes in wording are also of some interest (and, in my opinion, they are mostly not improvements; perhaps Tindley, when he came to publish the text, no longer had a copy of the prior publication and had to redo the whole from rusty memory. (For example, I'm thinking of the change from "coast" to a redundant "host".)

Also note that this Ebenezer Hymnal 1887 you sent the scan from is not the same edition as the one indexed in DNAH: your copy (or SWBTS's) is English and Naaman is #156, whereas the DNAH indexes the English and German edition, and we have only a d# rather than a hymn number from the book.

Fri, 03/01/2013 - 12:42 — cfenner

As far as the hymnal goes, the full title at SWBTS and Newberry is English gospel songs, or the Ebenezer hymnal : to be used in revival, holiness and general prayer meetings. This may actually be the same as the DNAH edition, but without proper hymn numbers or a surviving copy of the alleged English and German edition, this is impossible to tell. DNAH may be in error. At any rate, if an English/German edition did exist, I don't imagine that the text of this hymn would be different.

As far as the extra stanzas are concerned, Tindley may have found that this became a publishing problem (paper/space), or in practice he only used the first four, or after fourteen years he decided he didn't like the last two, or as you say, he may have lost his original copy. All we can say for sure is that the 1887 and 1901 editions are different in minor ways, minus two stanzas, and the rest is conjecture.

I think the greater question at this point is whether we can prove or support the idea that Tindley is the true author of the 1887 edition by showing that he was writing hymns as early as 1887. Otherwise, this calls into question the authorial integrity of his other works, and we've already seen that issue arise earlier in this thread.

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