Released 1991 Genre New-age Label Warner Music | Recorded 1990 Length 4:24 | |
B-side 'S Fágaim Mo Bhaile
Oíche Chiúin (Silent Night) | ||
How Can I Keep From Singing?" (also known by its incipit "My Life Flows On in Endless Song") is a Christian hymn with music written by American Baptist minister Robert Wadsworth Lowry. The song is frequently, though erroneously, cited as a traditional Quaker or Shaker hymn. The original composition has now entered into the public domain, and appears in several hymnals and song collections, both in its original form and with a revised text. Though it is not, in fact, a Quaker hymn, twentieth-century Quakers adopted it as their own and use it widely today.
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Authorship and lyrics
The first known publication of the words was on August 7, 1868, in The New York Observer, Titled "Always Rejoicing", and, attributed to "Pauline T.", the text reads:
"real" is also used here. These are the words as published by Robert Lowry in the 1869 song book, Bright Jewels for the Sunday School. Here Lowry claims credit for the music, an iambic 87 87 tune with an 87 87 refrain, but gives no indication as to who wrote the words. These words were also published in a British periodical in 1869, The Christian Pioneer, but no author is indicated. Lewis Hartsough, citing Bright Jewels as source of the lyrics and crediting Lowry for the tune, included "How Can I Keep from Singing?" in the 1872 edition of the Revivalist. Ira D. Sankey published his own setting of the words in Gospel Hymns, No. 3 (1878), writing that the words were anonymous. In 1888, Henry S. Burrage listed this hymn as one of those for which Lowry had written the music, but not the lyrics.
Doris Plenn learned the original hymn from her grandmother, who reportedly believed that it dated from the early days of the Quaker movement. Plenn contributed the following verse around 1950, which was taken up by Pete Seeger and other folk revivalists:
History
During the 20th century, this hymn was not widely used in congregational worship. Diehl's index to a large number of hymnals from 1900 to 1966 indicates that only one hymnal included it: the 1941 edition of The Church Hymnal of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, titled "My Life Flows On" (hymn no. 265). It was also published in the earlier 1908 Seventh-day Adventist hymnal, Christ In Song, under the title "How Can I Keep From Singing?" (hymn no. 331). The United Methodist Church published it in its 2000 hymnal supplement, The Faith We Sing (hymn no. 2212), giving credit for the lyrics as well as the tune to Robert Lowry. The Faith We Sing version changes some of the lyrics and punctuation from the 1868 version. It was also included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, printed in 1993 and following.
Pete Seeger learned a version of this song from Doris Plenn, a family friend, who had it from her North Carolina family. His version made this song fairly well known in the folk revival of the 1960s. Seeger's version omits or modifies much of the Christian wording of the original, and adds Plenn's verse above. The reference in the added verse intended by Seeger and by Plenn—both active in left-wing causes—is to 'witch hunts' of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Seeger himself was sentenced to a year in jail in 1955 as a result of his testimony before the Committee, which he did not serve due to a technicality). Most folk singers, including Enya, have followed Seeger's version.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, How Can I Keep From Singing was recorded by Catholic Folk musician Ed Gutfreund (on an album called "From An Indirect Love"), and the music was published in a widely used Catholic Hymnal called "Glory and Praise", and was popular among Catholic liturgical music ministers, especially those who used guitar. In this, and in an 1993 recording by Marty Haugen, Jeanne Cotter, and David Haas, the quatrain beginning: "No storm can shake my inmost calm ..." is used as a repeated refrain.
It is also sung by Dahlia Malloy (Minnie Driver) in the episode 'Virgin Territory' from Season One of FX's The Riches.
In his radio singing debut, actor Martin Sheen performed this song (using the Plenn–Seeger lyrics) on A Prairie Home Companion in September 2007.
It has been used on the 2009 Christmas advertisement for the UK supermarket, Waitrose, in a performance by Camilla Kerslake.
Contemporary Christian artist Chris Tomlin clearly was inspired by the song when he wrote his song, "How Can I Keep from Singing" in 2006. Rich Mullins may also have drawn inspiration from this hymn when he recorded "How Can I Keep Myself from Singing?" in 1995 for the same album as his popular modern worship song "Awesome God". So, Pauline T's Christian poem is again regularly sung in churches as a worship song.
Use by Quakers
The song has often been attributed to "early" Quakers, but Quakers did not permit congregational singing in worship until after the American Civil War (and many still do not have music regularly). But learning it in social activist circles of the fifties and hearing Seeger's (erroneous) attribution endeared the song to many contemporary Quakers, who have adopted it as a sort of anthem. It was published in the Quaker songbook Songs of the Spirit, and the original words, with Plenn's verse, were included in the much more ambitious Quaker hymnal project, Worship in Song: A Friends Hymnal in 1996.
Enya version
The song received new prominence in 1991 when Irish musician Enya released a recording of the hymn on her album Shepherd Moons. Enya's version follows Pete Seeger's replacement of some more overtly Christian lines, for example: "What tho' my joys and comforts die? The Lord my Saviour liveth" became "What tho' the tempest 'round me roars, I hear the truth it liveth."
Enya and her record company were sued for copyright infringement by Sanga Music, Inc. for recording the song because she had mistakenly credited this track as a "traditional Shaker hymn", thus assumed it as public domain. Pete Seeger had helped make the song fairly well-known in the 1950s by publishing it with Doris Plenn's additional third verse in his folk music magazine Sing Out! (Vol. 7, No 1. 1957), recording it, and mistakenly credited it as a "traditional Quaker hymn" without copyrighting Plenn's verse, thus presenting the entire song as "public domain". It was again published by Sanga Music, Inc. in 1964. Its origin and controversial legal status was later clarified and settled in court in 1992: it was neither a traditional Shaker nor Quaker hymn—it's actually a Sunday School song written by Rev. Robert Lowry that was published in a songbook he edited titled Bright Jewels for the Sunday School (New York: Bigelow & Main, 1869). Because Seeger presented the new verse as being public domain, the court decided that Plenn had lost her rights and Enya could use the verse without paying royalties.
The song was also released as a single in November of the same year, with "Oíche Chiún" and "'S Fagaim Mo Bhaile" appearing as additional song.
The videoclip featured Enya singing in a church in the Gaoth Dobhair countryside, while also including archive footage of political figures such as Nelson Mandela or Boris Yeltsin among others, and references to the Gulf War and famine. The line about tyrants trembling showed Gennady Yanayev, leader of the 1991 August Coup, in a press conference with visibly trembling hands—apparently toward the end when the coup was unraveling.
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