Songs from back in the day
We’ve made the discovery that Madeline is starting to show some enjoyment for music. For the first few weeks of her life, she showed little or no reaction to music being played, but lately during fussy times she will quiet down (at least for a few minutes) if we turn some music on. It can be the music on the mobile, classical or jazz on the radio, or even my somewhat-off-key singing.
A couple of nights ago Madeline was again fussy for no aparent reason…she was tired, but wouldn’t fall asleep. I started singing to her, and quickly realized that if I was going to sing to her for any length of time I would need to come up with more to sing than just “You are My Sunshine” and the “Go to Sleep” song. While I probably know the words to dozens if not well over a hundred songs we sing at church or that I have on CDs, when pressed to sing one with no musical or lyrical prompting at all, either my mind goes blank thinking of anything to sing, or I can’t remember the words of songs that I really should know.
I then remembered I had a small song book we used to use for student group worship times…circa 1996 or 1997 or so. Luckily, it was still somewhere I could get to it among the sea of boxes. The booklet only contains words to songs, so you’re out of luck if you can’t remember the melody…but out of the nearly 150 songs the book contains, I probably remember the tune to at least half of them. Some of the songs are Christian “praise chorus” classics like “Lord I Lift Your Name on High” and “All in All,” while many more of them are old-school Great Commission scripture songs and other numbers that I think are unique to our movement (or maybe they just haven’t been popular in general since the 70s?).
I will admit that I really like the scripture songs from back in the day. As I sung many of these to Madeline — personal favorites of mine like “Jeremiah 32″ and “Psalm 67,” and many others — It not only made the time pass more quickly as she contininued wailing (she was quited down for the first 5-10 minutes of my singing, then resumed her crying), but it was also an encouragement to me. It brought back happy memories of getting together in the basement at the Hunt St. house on Sunday nights my freshman or sophomore year (back when the Bovenmyers still lived there) for dinner and singing. It reminded me of early fellowship team meetings back when I was still a student leading a team with Ben Lennander, as we were trying our best to figure out how to reach out in the towers. And it reminded me of my early years at Stonebrook when we still met at the high school, and the church was a whole lot smaller than it is now.
Sure, some of these songs contain what could be considered modern musical faux-pas like enlongating unimportant words (see the word “produce” in the Psalm 67 song) and many are in a musical style that has been uncool since the early 80s. But they are still an encouraging way to worship the Lord and meditate on God’s word!