This is a legacy post from October 29th, 2005

O for a thousand tongues to sing

I've been learning 'O for a thousand tongues' to use at Kings tomorrow. It's one of Charles Wesley's undisputed classics, so I'm quite surprised to realise that not only have I never led with it but I've also never learned to sing it properly.

I'm learning it to Thomas Jarman's 'Lyngham', which is the only tune I've ever heard, but without any sheet music I'm actually finding it quite a process to untangle exactly who sings what at the end. (Cyberhymnal has six tunes for the hymn, so unless you're familiar with 'Lyngham' that comment will make even less sense than the 'Lyngham' parts do to me.) Fortunately the rhythm is fairly straightforward and the chords can be easily simplified, so at least I can concentrate on getting the tune right. (See below for PDFs of my simplified chords.)

We enter a whole other realm when it comes to the words. There are 17 verses! And apparently the verse that begins 'O for a thousand tongues' was originally the seventh?! There are some beautiful lines among the 17 verses, but some are hilarious (I'd like to see the reaction if we used the verse that begins "Murderers and all ye hellish crew"!) and if I understand correctly, one is genuinely offensive.

Again fortunately, no one sings all the verses. In fact of the 17 listed on Cyberhymnal I have only ever come across 7. I think a fairly standard edit is to only sing the first six verses, and to sing the second ("My gracious Master and my God...") as the last of those six. That's certainly a trend I'm going to follow, although I do like this later verse:

Look unto Him, ye nations, own
Your God, ye fallen race;
Look, and be saved through faith alone,
Be justified by grace.

But I think it would be rather out of context if I just tagged that verse on the end of the six.

All in all 'O for a thousand tongues' is a mixed bag. That may sound almost heretical given its standing in the unofficial canon of hymnody, but with six tunes, the difficulty of the most famous of those, 17 verses, little consensus on verse order and some highly suspect lines hidden away, I think the moments of brilliance are almost outweighed. It will defintely be good for us to sing the six verse edit at Kings but I can't see it becoming one of my favourites.