A tour of “Iowa-rooted” hymns?

The columnist is deep into church music right now after hearing so much of it during the Easter season. And he’s really loving the old hymns. Do you?

DES MOINES, Iowa – I’m deep into church music right now, after attending extra services from Palm Sunday thru Easter Sunday. Classical pieces to good ol’ traditional hymns.

I heard a great, nearly-new composition when the Chancel Choir and a chamber orchestra at our Plymouth United Church of Christ here in Des Moines performed “Illuminare.” That is a stunningly good, five-part composition that musically moves us from darkness to light, in Latin.

Amazingly, it’s the “first extended work” of a Des Moines-based composer Elaine Hagenberg, according to her website, and it’s bound to become an Easter-season classic. When the Plymouth choir was performing it during our service on Palm Sunday, the 45-year-old Hagenberg was said to be in Los Angeles, where her composition was being performed with a choir and full orchestra.

I recommend you find the Plymouth choir’s performance of it on YouTube and hear it for yourself. Then hear it live, whenever you can.

Director Christopher Goodson, Plymouth Church’s Chanel Choir and a chamber orchestra starting into composer Elaine Hagenberg’s “Illuminare” on Palm Sunday. You can enjoy this on YouTube by clicking this link. (Plymouth Church photo)

And what about the hymns?

The Plymouth Chancel Choir led us in “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” Tenor Ed Griffith, one of my faves, soloed in the darkened church on “Were You There.” We also heard “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” “Thine is the Glory,” “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” and “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”

I probably should explain, for readers who don’t remember this, I love old hymns.

Raised Catholic, I seldom heard any of them – which seemed to be mostly Protestant – when I was growing up in Shenandoah in southwest Iowa in the 1950s and ’60s. But as my horizons broadened in adulthood – both musically and religiously – the more I heard and sang good hymns, the more I liked them.

One Christmas in the late 1970s, my in-laws Junior and Barbara Johnson in Essex, Iowa, asked what gift they could buy me. I asked them to hire Ramona Bengtson, the organist at their Presbyterian Church in Essex, to meet me at their little church on an idle weeknight. They did. Ramona and I locked ourselves in the sanctuary. She played the organ, I picked through their hymnal, and I sang hymn after hymn for a full hour, as loud as I wanted, to Ramona’s accompaniment.

Not long after that, I realized that the “longest continuously-running radio sho in Des Moines” was “Hymn Time,” which I recall was aired Sunday mornings on KRNT radio and sponsored by the Anderson Erickson Dairy. I started listening – singing along as a warm-up for my own choir singing then at St. Mary of Nazareth Catholic Church in Des Moines – and loved the show. What ho! I found out that KRNT was changing its format on Sunday mornings and ending “Hymn Time.”

I was relatively new writing my “Iowa Boy” columns in the Des Moines Register, and new columnists are always looking for a cause to champion. “Hymn Time” became my cause.
I raised hell about the cancellation of such a wholesome radio tradition and encouraged some other station to pick-up the show. An FM in Ames – was it KEZT 104.1? – stepped up and made a deal with AE Dairy. And we got our Sunday morning hymns back on the air!

Meanwhile, I was forcing my son Andrew Offenburger, then maybe 8 or 9, to take piano lessons. To encourage him, I said I’d take lessons, too. The kid became really good for his age. But I got kicked out of lessons because I never seem to find time to practice. I did manage to learn one song, the hymn “Amazing Grace,” and bragged about that in my column.

A short time later, the legendary pianist Roger Williams was asked to come back home to Des Moines and play a benefit concert for some cause at the old Younkers Tea Room. Williams said he’d do so, but only if I’d agree to join him on the Steinway grand, where each of us would play “Amazing Grace.” I played my third grade-version, Roger then played a heavenly version that was Grammy-worthy. And then we played a duet on the song he was best-known for, “Autumn Leaves.” I always hoped my former piano teacher read that column.

Painting of the Locust Creek campground near Seymour in southern Iowa, where the great Mormon anthem “Come, Come, Ye Saints” was written in early 1846. This painting is displayed on a plaque near that site. (Photo by Clay Aucoin, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was visiting last summer.)

My favorite round of advocacy for hymns – actually a specific hymn – came in early 1996 when Iowa was celebrating its Sesquicentennial. You might remember that year was also the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Mormon Trek, the great migration of the persecuted members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from their headquarters and homes in Nauvoo, Illinois, across southern Iowa and eventually all the way west to Utah. The “Saints,” as they called themselves, founded several Iowa towns along the way.

Matthew Chatterley, a Register newsroom artist and a member of the LDS Church, told me that a great Mormon hymn had been written when the Trek was in in Iowa in the late winter or early spring of 1846.

The Saints, on foot, on horseback and in wagons, were slogging their way west through snow and mud. At a dreary campground along Locust Creek, southwest of today’s town of Seymour, a messenger on horseback arrived from Nauvoo. One message he carried was for Elder William Clayton, reporting that Clayton’s wife back in Nauvoo had given birth to a child.

The story goes that Clayton was so overwhelmed with joy that he immediately started writing what has become the anthem of the LDS church: “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” There are 17 million Mormons around the world singing it regularly. If you’ve never heard it, please Google it and listen. The song – especially when sung by today’s famous LDS “Tabernacle Choir at Cathedral Square” – is so inspiring. It tells how the challenges were so great on the Trek, but because of the faith of the people, “All is well, all is well!”

It seemed such a good story to me that I asked Chatterley if he could help get permission from the LDS church to duplicate sheet music of the anthem for a special project in Iowa. I would invite church choirs across the state, of all denominations, to sing the Mormon anthem at their services on the weekend that was the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Trek. The LDS Church gave permission.

I wrote a column telling the story of how the anthem was written here, suggesting Iowa choirs should sing it on that weekend. I offered to send free copies of the sheet music to all directors who requested it. And more than 100 church choirs sang it that weekend in a grand ecumenical salute.

Another plaque — this one telling the story of the great LDS Church hymn — near the site of the Locust Creek campground that people used on the Mormon Trek in 1946. This is also adjacent to Tharp Cemetery, if that helps locate the place. The actual campground site is on nearby private property. (Photo by Clay Aucoin)

Thinking about all this again the past week – after Palm Sunday, Holy Week and Easter – I decided it’s time for some new action on what we should call “Iowa-rooted” hymns.

I think we need a new inventory of what favorite hymns were composed, written or inspired here in Iowa – and who’s done the performing. Maybe we can identify a self-guided “hymns tour” people can take around the state, visiting the places of inspiration, hearing someone there sing the hymn that originated there.

To start dialogue about this, I have pestered two friends of mine who know hymns and other forms of church music – Roger Revell of Waukee and Ben Allaway of Des Moines.

Revell, a high school classmate of mine, worked the first part of his career in musicology for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, now named the Community of Christ. Allaway is a noted composer, singer, choir director and teacher who has works being performed across the nation and around the world. I now owe the two of them lunch, and I can’t wait to hear them engage in conversation!

Here's a line-up of “Iowa-rooted” hymns the three of us more-or-less agree that Iowans should celebrate – and remember, I’m asking you readers to get involved, debate this, add to it and make it fun:

-- “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” for the reasons outlined above. Again, that will take us near Seymour in southern Iowa.

-- “Church in the Wildwood,” written at and for the Little Brown Church in Bradford, outside Nashua in northeast Iowa.

-- “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You,” composed and written by Meredith Willson, based on a childhood lullaby an older relative would sing to him as a youngster in Mason City. Note that the home church of Willson, who died in 1984, is the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Mason City, and “we still sing that song at the end of our service every Sunday,” church office manager Jerry Taylor told me last week.

-- “The Old Rugged Cross,” which was actually written in Michigan, but we’re claiming it for the southeast Iowa towns of Hiteman, Albia and maybe Lucas, because its composer George Bennard spent his boyhood in those communities.

-- “Have Thine Own Way, Lord.” We don’t know where it was written but the writer and maybe composer was Adelaide Addison Pollard, a native of Bloomfield, Iowa, who lived and worked in religion around the world and, after her death in 1934, was buried in Fort Madison.

-- Ben Allaway’s “May the Lord Be Always with You,” which he wrote when he was in graduate school, entitling it then “Covenant Blessing.” Since about 1994, we at Plymouth Church in Des Moines have been singing it as a benediction at the end of Sunday services.

-- Let’s go to Wilton in southeast Iowa and do “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which is one of “7,000 to 8,000” (!) hymns or songs written by Wilton native Charles Gabriel (1856-1932).

-- And let’s go to Waverly, where the uber-talented John Ylvisaker lived and worked the last 29 years of his life, which ended in 2017. Let’s focus on his “Borning Cry,” although he wrote “thousands and thousands of hymns,” his widow Fern M. Kruger, still of Waverly, told me. Allaway and Kruger told me that Ylvisaker is often remembered as “the Lutheran Bob Dylan” or “the Lutheran Pete Seeger.”

-- There should be a Decorah stop, in honor of the late Weston Noble, who directed Luther College’s Nordic Choir for 54 years. There, we should do “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” which was apparently one of Noble’s favorites. At least he had his famed choir closing concerts with that hymn for more than 25 years.

-- And we should stop in tiny Newkirk in northwest Iowa, which had (or is it possibly still there?) the home church of Robert Schuller, the internationally famous “televangelist” who had the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., and led the “Hour of Power” TV show. The best I can suggest on an appropriate hymn there is “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” an arrangement of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” by a Henry Van Dyke in 1901. Schuller reportedly used that arrangement for years to start his church services.

-- Finally, we all must go to Spillville in northeast Iowa where in 1892 or ’93, the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak spent summers and worked on his famous “New World Symphony.” He lived and worked in a building that you can still visit in Spillville – it holds the extraordinary “Bily Clocks” collection – and he also attended mass and played the organ at St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, which is still open and operating. Allaway tells me that the portion of the New World Symphony most appropriate for inclusion in our “Iowa-rooted hymns” tour is the “Largo.” Dvorak is said to have based that on African American spirituals, which he was introduced to in his 1890s travels around the U.S. That Largo is better known as “Goin’ Home,” a popular freedom song, one that is also often heard at funerals.

Finally, let me hear from you about hymns I’ve missed, especially in religious traditions in Iowa that I don’t know as well – Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and others.

We’ve got a musical heritage here that we should honor and celebrate.

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You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com

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