Oh Be Careful, Little Eyes: A Song History

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"Oh Be Careful, Little Eyes" is a Sunday-school chorus whose words carry no author's name in the hymnals indexed by Hymnary.org; where the index records a text credit at all, it marks the words as anonymous or unknown.[1] The earliest of the 22 books Hymnary.org lists for these words is Action, a 1944 children's songbook, and the site's entry for the text gives a 1944 copyright line in the name of Zondervan Music Publishers.[1][2] In Action the arrangement is credited only to the initials "H. D. L."; fifty years later, the 1994 Ambassador Hymnal names Harry Dixon Loes as the tune's composer.[2][3] Loes was a prolific gospel songwriter who joined the music faculty of Moody Bible Institute in 1939.[4]

Embroidered sampler with a house, flower borders and a verse titled On Religion

Angenett Jackson, Sampler, silk embroidery on linen, 1838. A girl's devotional sampler, shown for the song's childhood piety; it has no connection to the song.

Hymnary.org's own tune record differs from that hymnal, listing the composer as anonymous and the source as traditional.[3] The same index places the melody in The Anti-Saloon League Song Book of 1915 and in other songbooks through 1918, where it carried Eben E. Rexford's temperance song "Vote It Out," which suggests the tune is older than the children's words.[3][5] The sources consulted here do not show who first wrote the tune.[3] Hymnals have continued to print the chorus, among them the New National Baptist Hymnal (1977 and 2001), the Christian Methodist Episcopal hymnal of 2000, and Songs of the Kingdom (2015).[1]

For dulcimer players, it is one of 23 songs in Mike Anderson's Sunday Songs For Kids, published by Fingers Of Steel, which writes it out in DAD tuning in standard notation, with chords that a guitar or banjo can share.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Oh Be Careful, Little Eyes"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "O, Be Careful".
  2. Hymnary.org: "Action (Vol. 1), no. 58: Oh, Be Careful" (1944).
  3. Hymnary.org: "[O be careful, little eyes, what you see]" (tune).
  4. Hymnary.org: "Harry Dixon Loes".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Vote it Out" (Eben E. Rexford).
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Mike Anderson, Sunday Songs For Kids".
  7. Image: Angenett Jackson, Sampler, silk embroidery on linen, 1838. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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