Come Life, Shaker Life: A Song History

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"Come Life, Shaker Life" is a Shaker worship song that the community's manuscripts credit to Elder Issachar Bates and date to 1835.[1] Bates (1758–1837), who had fought in the Revolutionary War and lived in rural upstate New York, became a celibate Shaker at forty-three; he was soon central to the sect's growth in the West, and his many texts and songs left a lasting mark on Shaker hymnody.[2]

Old photograph of a country road past a large bare tree, stone walls and plain brick and frame buildings

Detroit Publishing Co., Main St., Shaker Village, Pittsfield [i.e. Hancock], Mass., glass negative, c1906. A Shaker village in Massachusetts, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

In his notes on the songs heard in the film Shakers, Daniel W. Patterson places it among the songs for the "quick dance," a lively part of worship that often stirred believers toward spiritual gifts.[1] He also points out that the text echoes the biblical account of King David dancing before the Ark, the kind of scriptural precedent Shakers invoked when their own dancing was questioned.[1] The National Endowment for the Arts, in its profile of Sister Mildred Barker of the Sabbathday Lake community in Maine, uses the song to illustrate how Shakers sorted their songs into kinds, noting that it refers to the movement of the men and women as it was sung.[3]

Composer Gwyneth Walker's Come Life, Shaker Life! (2002), commissioned by the Sonoma Valley Chorale for mixed chorus, children's chorus and orchestra, is built on Shaker tunes and lyrics, and its title song draws on the same image of David's dance.[4] Shelley Stevens includes it in Baker's Dozen #4: Shaker Music, a thirteen-song collection of traditional Shaker melodies for mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, with standard notation and tablature for each piece, published by Fingers Of Steel.[5]

Our book that contains the song "Come Life, Shaker Life"

Sources

  1. Folkstreams: "Notes on Songs in the Film, Shakers" by Daniel W. Patterson.
  2. Project MUSE: "Issachar Bates: A Shaker's Journey" by Carol Medlicott (University Press of New England, 2013).
  3. National Endowment for the Arts: "Sister Mildred Barker".
  4. Gwyneth Walker: "Come Life, Shaker Life!".
  5. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #4: Shaker Music".
  6. Image: Detroit Publishing Co., Main St., Shaker Village, Pittsfield [i.e. Hancock], Mass., glass negative, c1906. Library of Congress.

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