As the Sixties turned to the Seventies, there was a kind of laid-back revivalist fervor on the hit parade. Two of the Beatles - George and Paul - made contributions with "My Sweet Lord" and "Let It Be" (although the reference to "Mother Mary" comforting him is, says Paul, about his own mum, Mary). Paul Simon is Jewish but was going through a gospel phase when he wrote "Bridge Over Troubled Water". "I Don't Know How to Love Him", Him being Jesus, was a hit from Jesus Christ Superstar, as was "Day by Day" from Godspell. The former's lyrics were by Tim Rice, whose views on organized religion can fluctuate, but the latter's were by the 13th century English bishop St Richard of Chichester, who was made of sturdier stuff.
If any hit can be said to have started the ball rolling on this short-lived pop genre, it's this week's song. And, unlike those of Harrison, McCartney, Simon, Rice & Lloyd Webber and even St Richard of Chichester, this one was recorded in an actual church. In fact, I believe this to be the only Number One record (in France, Germany and the Netherlands) or even Number Two (UK) or Number Four (US) to have been made in church. On the other hand, if, like George Harrison with his "Hallelujahs" and Hare Krishna chants in "My Sweet Lord", you're into melding western and eastern religions, well, the only Number One hit to have been recorded in church was distributed by Buddah.
The man who created this recording phenomenon died last week at the age of 74. Edwin Hawkins was born in Oakland, California in 1943, and while still a toddler was singing in his church youth choir. At five he learned to play the piano, and by the age of seven became the accompanist for the family gospel ensemble. As a teenager he co-founded the Northern California State Youth Choir for the Church of God in Christ, which grew to almost fifty singers.
And then one day he got a yen to make an album - not because he was itching to be a big pop star, but just because it might be a good fundraiser for the church, and would additionally provide a permanent record of some of the group's best arrangements. He figured it might sell 500 copies, all of them to church members and their friends. So in 1967 he arranged a recording session not at a studio but at the Ephesian Church of God in Christ at Berkeley. Among the eight songs they recorded was a three-century-old hymn.
When I say it's a "three-century-old" hymn, I'm sorta kinda thinking like the gnarled, leathery, plaid-clad Yankee oldtimer who tells you he's had the same trusty ax for seventy years. He's replaced the blade three times and the handle five times, but it's still the same old trusty ax he's had for seventy years. That's what happened to "Oh Happy Day": If you overlook the fact the tune was replaced and then near 90 per cent of the words, it goes all the way back to a melody composed in 1704 by Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen.
Who? Well, Herr Doktor Freylinghausen was a German theologian, a pietist of the Halle School, but his relevance to our Song of the Week department is that he was a crackerjack hymnologist who collected and published a lot of European hymn tunes, including a few dozen he wrote himself. His anthology was officially titled Geistreiches Gesangsbuch (the Spiritual Hymn Book), but was known in England as Freylinghausen's Songbook. And among the tunes was one that tickled the fancy of Philip Doddridge.
Who? Well, the Reverend Mr Doddridge was an English nonconformist, the twentieth (and initially thought stillborn) child of a dealer in pickles and oils and his wife. By the time he was twelve, both parents were dead, but among many putative benefactors the Duchess of Bedford offered to put Philip through university for ordination in the Church of England. He politely declined, saying he preferred to be among the Dissenters. If you go to the United Reformed Church in Northampton, you'll see where he preached for much of his life: The clue's on the road sign - "Doddridge Street" - and on the church sign: Doddridge United Reformed Church. He was never in the best of health, and in 1751 sailed for Lisbon to improve his constitution, only to die there of tuberculosis three weeks after arriving.
In a not long life, he wrote a lot, including an influential book called The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. A third of a century after Doddridge's death, William Wilberforce read it on a tour of Europe, and it made him a believing Christian. So in a certain sense we owe the abolition of the slave trade and much of the child-sex trade to Philip Doddridge. Aside from writing books, he liked to write hymns, including this:
O happy day that fixed my choice
On Thee, my Saviour and my God!
Well may this glowing heart rejoice
And tell its raptures all abroad...
That was the first verse, after which came the chorus:
Happy day, happy day
When Jesus washed my sins away!
He taught me how to watch and pray
And live rejoicing every day
Happy day, happy day
When Jesus washed my sins away!
Mr Doddridge set his words to a favorite and available tune from Freylinghausen's Songbook. And that's how "O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice" was first published, four years after Doddridge's death, and sixteen years after Freylinghausen's, in 1755 - under the title ""Rejoicing in Our Covenant Engagement to God" in an anthology of the author's hitherto unpublished hymns. It remained in that form for almost a century - 99 years - and was a favorite with, among others, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who chose it for the confirmations of some of their children
And then in 1854 it caught the attention of Edward Francis Rimbault.
Who? No, not Rimbaud. Or even Rambo. E F Rimbault was an organist and musicologist, born in Soho in 1816 into a Huguenot family who'd settled in England in 1685 after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Like Doddridge, Rimbault wrote a lot of books. Unlike Doddridge, he didn't write a lot of hymns. But throughout his life he occasionally composed, and the muse descended with respect to "O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice". He liked Doddridge's words, but not Freylinghausen's tune, so he wrote Doddridge another one, for his various verses:
O happy bond, that seals my vows
To Him Who merits all my love!
Let cheerful anthems fill His house
While to that sacred shrine I move...
And of course he also re-set Doddridge's refrain:
Happy day, happy day
When Jesus washed my sins away!
He taught me how to watch and pray...
To be honest, I don't really care for Mr Rimbault's tune, and find Doktor Freylinghausen's original far more beguiling. I'm aware that none of these three men can be considered a working songwriter, but a point I've made over and over in these columns about songwriting does, I think, apply here - that lyricists are more sensitive to the needs of music than composers are to the needs of words; or, perhaps more practically, that lyricists are better at fixing words to notes than composers are at fixing notes to tunes. So I find Mr Rimbault's melody a bit of a stinker: Half the entire verse is the same four-note phrase, reprised thrice. The rest is two further, identically measured four-note phrases. And none of the three is a patch on its equivalent in the Freylinghausen tune.
But what do I know? Many strains of Protestantism value simplicity in their hymns, and Rimbault's version quickly supplanted the original. And that's where "O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice" rested for another century - until 1967, when Edwin Hawkins came up with a fundraising idea for his church:
I hired Century Records, a local vanity label, to record an album of songs by the choir. My plan was to order 500 copies and have members sell them for about $5 each to raise money for our church.
Hawkins had some fifty singers in his choir, so he reckoned, if each sold ten LPs, the record would make $2,500 - which would be enough to pay for a trip to the church youth conference in Washington. The album would be called Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord, and would actually be recorded in the house of the Lord, with the choir performing eight songs from their current repertoire. One of them - just a number in their set they'd been singing for a year or so, no big deal - was Hawkins' version of that old hymn that, in one form or another, had now been knocking about for over two centuries, thanks to the efforts of a German hymnologist, an English nonconformist, and a Huguenot organist. So who else would you need to put it over the top? Well, how about a Brazilian samba maestro: Sérgio Mendes.
Wait a minute... Sérgio Mendes? Brasil '66? That can't be right. Well, no, not really. But Mr Mendes was uppermost in Edwin Hawkins' mind when in 1966 he decided to "update" the hymn with "new chord voicings and a gospel feel":
One of my influences at the time was pianist Sérgio Mendes. I liked how he alternated between major and minor keys and created rhythmic patterns on the keyboard. My piano intro was along those lines.
What came after Mr Hawkins' piano intro? Well, not a lot of the Reverend Mr Doddridge's text. What appealed to Hawkins about Doddridge's hymn was the "lovely, simple message" - and the simpler the better. Hawkins junked all the half-dozen verses, and distilled the chorus to its essence - nine words:
Oh Happy Day (Oh Happy Day)
Oh Happy Day (Oh Happy Day)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
He washed my sins away (Oh Happy Day)
Oh Happy Day (Oh Happy Day)...
Okay, ten words, if you include the "He", which functions as an abbreviated recapitulation - and was apparently an ad lib by Hawkins' choice for lead singer on the track, Dorothy Combs Morrison. Oddly enough, Mrs Morrison found the nine words hard to learn. So at the church, before the session began, she borrowed a pen and wrote the lyrics on her palms, and then sang the song with her hands up, palms facing. "Everyone thought I was feeling the spirit," she said. Aside from singing gospel with the choir, Dorothy was also performing in some local blues clubs, on the down low, as "the church would have frowned on that". As Billie Holiday sang:
If I go to church on Sunday
Then cabaret all day Monday
Ain't nobody's business if I do...
But toward the end of "Happy Day" she improvised a "Good God!", which either was feeling the spirit, or a touch of James Brown slipping in, or maybe both.
What about the middle of Philip Doddridge's chorus? The bit that's not about the happy day and washing?
He taught me how to watch and pray
And live rejoicing every day...
In effect, Edwin Hawkins turned that into the B-section of a conventional AABA pop song - like, say, "The Way You Look Tonight", with "Oh happy day" as the main section and the above lines as the equivalent of a contrasting release. So Mrs Morrison sang the first two "Happy day" passages, with the choir doing the fills, and then they took the lead on the middle section:
He taught me how
To watch
Fight and pray
Fight and pray!
And live rejoicing
Ev'ry day
Ev'ry day!
Those staccato "Fight and prays!" are a nice contrast with the mellow vibe of the main theme. I'm not sure what Philip Doddridge would have made of all the fighting, although nonconformism in early 18th century England certainly required a toughness. But, aside from that addition, the text would certainly have been recognizable to him. Rimbault's melody is another matter: There is a loose relationship in the shape of the phrases - "When Jesus washed" - but Hawkins has shaken it free of its tumty-tumtiness, kept a few things but discarded almost everything else.
The whole thing took over five minutes, which you wouldn't have done in 1968 if you were thinking of making a pop single for radio stations to play. Nor would a serious record company have recorded it in a church, and certainly not on an old two-track recorder, which was all Lamont Bench, the engineer (and a Mormon), happened to have (at a time when the industry standard was eight-track). And in any case Hawkins thought that the popular tracks on the album would be "Joy, Joy" and "To My Father's House", at least with church members. I believe that's what they sang at the church youth conference in DC, where they placed second. Nobody gave any thought to including "Oh Happy Day", which was, as Hawkins put it, "not our favorite song".
The 500 copies of the LP were quickly pressed, and distributed to the choir members, and that was that - until early in 1969, on a Sunday morning, when Dorothy Combs Morrison heard Abe "Voco" Keshishian, a disc-jockey on KSAN-FM in San Francisco, introduce a familiar track. "Oh, my God," she realized. "That's us. That's me."
Evidently one of those 500 copies had found its way into the hands of the influential Mr Keshishian, who put it into heavy rotation on his blues and rock show. Then Dan Sorkin, the morning man at the city's powerhouse KSFO, picked up on "Happy Day", as did other Bay Area deejays - and Edwin Hawkins found himself with a problem: He needed more copies of the album than his local vanity-project presser could handle. By March 1969, major record companies were calling him to acquire the rights, and, not having a clue about the music biz, he consulted a friend, Mel Reid, who ran the local music store, Reid's Records. Mel recommended Buddah Records, which despite the name was run by Neil Bogart, who was Jewish. Bogart did a deal with Hawkins and released the single on Pavilion, their gospel label. Everyone was happy - except the Church of God in Christ, whose officials sent letters to the secular radio stations demanding they stop playing the track.
"We preach, and the Bible teaches, to take the gospel into all the world," reflected Hawkins, "but when it all comes down... the church world is quick to criticize that... I think sometimes that it is out of jealousy. Someone has succeeded, and people don't like it. A lot of that goes on."
But the Church of God in Christ was adamant. As he told Marc Myers of The Wall Street Journal:
The church thought that what we were doing was sacreligious, and insisted we remove the choir's name from the record. So Buddha renamed the choir the Edwin Hawkins Singers.
And so the Northern California State Youth Choir became pop stars. In June, shortly after it made the Billboard Top Five, the group appeared with the Isley Brothers at Yankee Stadium, which has a rather greater capacity than their church in Berkeley. Nobody got paid for the hit record, not even the lead singer, Dorothy Combs Morrison (although it did lead to plenty of lucrative work singing back-up for Van Morrison, Boz Scaggs, and Huey Lewis).
What happened? How did a choir singing in the Ephesian Church of God in Christ at Berkeley wind up with a Number One record in the Netherlands? A bemused deejay on the Chicago soul station WVON put it well:
Here's a new song climbing the charts. I don't know what to call it. It sounds like gospel and it sounds like soul. Whatever it is, the beat has a groove. I like it, and I'm gonna play it.
So he did, and so did everyone else, across North America and all around the world. It sounded like gospel and it sounded like soul, and the beat had a groove that it didn't have back in Edward Rimbault's day.
Of course, gospel influences have been present in black popular music for a long time. Writing about Ray Charles in Mark Steyn's Passing Parade (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc), I quote this pithy summation:
'He took the Lord's music and the devil's words and made this amalgam they call soul music,' said Jerry Wexler, his producer at Atlantic Records.
In a way, "Oh Happy Day" reversed the formula: the Lord's words and the devil's music - or anyway Sérgio Mendes', and all those other beats and grooves. In truth, there was enough Mendes and Latin percussion in there that didn't sound a lot like anything broadly recognized as gospel music at that time.
That year the Grammys, whose fine delineation of micro-genres has always been faintly risible, created the category of "Best Soul Gospel Performance" and in 1970 gave it to the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It was an influential record: Simon & Garfunkel hired Dorothy Combs Morrison to sing on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", and George Harrison came up with "My Sweet Lord" because he wanted to write his own "Oh Happy Day":
I was so thrilled with ' Oh Happy Day ' by the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It really just knocked me out, the idea of that song. And I just felt a great feeling of the Lord. So I thought, I'll write another 'Oh Happy Day', which became 'My Sweet Lord'.
Alas, he wound up writing another "He's So Fine", but that's a whole other story.
Yet perhaps even more remarkable are all those undemonstrative and non-evangelical Anglicans and Catholics and Godless secularists all over Europe who cheerfully sang along with:
Oh Happy Day (Oh Happy Day)
Oh Happy Day (Oh Happy Day)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
When Jesus washed (when Jesus washed)
He washed my sins away...
Buddah didn't think the big bucks were in Jesus, so they tried to move the Hawkins Singers into a more general peace'n'love vibe, getting them to cover, for example, the New Seekers' "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". The world yawned and moved on. Lightning doesn't often strike twice, and it didn't for Edwin Hawkins, though he got some mileage out of Euro-disco and urban-dance versions of "Happy Day". Who knows what the Reverend Mr Doddridge would have made of those. But across three centuries "O Happy Day That Fixed My Choice" has been anything but fixed: Thus a 21st century urban-dance version of a 20th century remake of a 19th century tune to an 18th century lyric to a just-after-the-end-of-the-17th century tune. Or a black American remake of a French Huguenot tune to an English nonconformist lyric to a German baroque tune. With a touch of Sérgio Mendes, a Mormon engineer and a Jewish Buddah.
~Many of Mark's most popular Song of the Week essays are collected together in his book A Song For The Season, personally autographed copies of which are available from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter the special promo code at checkout to enjoy the special Steyn Club member discount. Likewise with the above-mentioned Mark Steyn's Passing Parade.
Also for Mark Steyn Club members: If you disagree with any or all of the above, feel free to have at it in our comments section. As we always say, membership in The Mark Steyn Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content - in fact, we're providing more free content at SteynOnline than ever before - but one thing it does give you is commenter's privileges, so make it a happy day and have your say. For more on the Club, see here - and don't forget our special Gift Membership.
For a different kind of audio pleasure, don't forget this weekend's Tale for Our Time, a far less happy day for one St Petersburg clerk in Gogol's classic of Russian literature, The Overcoat: Part Three will be coming up later this evening.
