Simple Gifts: A Song History

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“Simple Gifts” began as a Shaker song in Maine. The Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake credits it to Elder Joseph Brackett and dates it to 1848,[1] and the Shaker music researcher Roger Lee Hall places its composition at Alfred, Maine, pointing to Shaker manuscripts that label it a dancing song or “quick dance” rather than a hymn.[2] Its short text praises humility and plainness while also cueing the turning steps of the dance.[2] Not every source agrees on the details: a Library of Congress note dates the melody to 1837–1847 without naming a composer, and notes that Edward D. Andrews included its words and melody in his 1940 study of Shaker song and dance, The Gift to Be Simple.[3]

Photograph of the plain white Shaker meetinghouse with its curved roof at New Lebanon, New York

Jack E. Boucher, Shaker Meetinghouse, New Lebanon, New York, 1963. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Aaron Copland brought the tune to a national audience. His ballet score Appalachian Spring, commissioned by the patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for the dancer Martha Graham, includes a set of variations on the Shaker melody; it was first performed in Washington, D.C., on October 30, 1944, and won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for music.[4] Copland came back to the song in 1950 as the fourth number of his Old American Songs, Set 1, and the Library of Congress credits his arrangements with raising a nearly forgotten Shaker tune to “the prominent role of an American anthem.”[3]

The melody gained a second life in church through the English songwriter Sydney Carter (1915–2004), whose “Lord of the Dance” sets his own words, about Christ’s life told as a dance, to an adaptation of the tune. His publisher, Stainer & Bell, dates the song to 1963 and treats it as a copyright separate from the Shaker original.[5] Hymnologist C. Michael Hawn dates its writing to 1962 and its first printing, in four stanzas, to a 1963 student hymnal. He adds that church youth groups took it up widely in the 1960s and 1970s, and that its best-known secular use, as a supposedly “Celtic” number in Michael Flatley’s dance show, obscures the tune’s American roots.[6] Hymnary.org now indexes the melody in dozens of hymnals under both texts.[7] The tune is also a natural for the mountain dulcimer, and Stephen Seifert includes “Simple Gifts” in his DAD-tuning collection Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[8]

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Sources

  1. Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village: "Shaker Music".
  2. Center for American Music Preservation (Roger Lee Hall): "Shaker and Non-Shaker Tunes".
  3. Library of Congress, Performing Arts Encyclopedia: "The Boatmen's Dance and Simple Gifts".
  4. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Appalachian Spring".
  5. Stainer & Bell: "Lord of the Dance".
  6. Discipleship Ministries, United Methodist Church (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: Lord of the Dance".
  7. Hymnary.org: "Simple Gifts" (tune).
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".