When Jesus Wept: A Song History
William Billings (1746-1800), a Boston tanner who taught himself music, has been called America's first choral composer.[1][2] "When Jesus Wept" first appeared in his New-England Psalm-Singer of 1770, the earliest printed collection made up entirely of one American composer's music, a book whose frontispiece Paul Revere engraved.[1][3] Billings squeezed the short canon into the bottom corner of the last page of a longer anthem, QUEEN, roughly midway through the volume.[1] Sources differ on the words: Hymnary.org credits the Boston lawyer and patriot Perez Morton (1751-1837), while some hymnals it indexes, The Faith We Sing among them, name Billings himself.[4][5]
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Meeting of Christ with Martha and Mary after the Death of Lazarus, reed pen and brown ink and wash, c. 1662-65. Christ meeting Martha and Mary after the death of Lazarus, drawn by Rembrandt, shown for the canon's title; the drawing has no connection to the song.
The piece is a canon for two to four voices, set out on the page so that it looks like ordinary four-part choral writing; its Aeolian melody spans about an octave and a half, and the line drops as the text speaks of a falling tear.[1] Britannica singles it out for its austerity.[2] Discipleship Ministries calls it perhaps the most often republished of all Billings's works, and Hymnary.org finds it in 25 hymnals, from The Hymnal 1982 and The Presbyterian Hymnal to The Shenandoah Harmony of 2012.[1][4]
Waterson:Carthy recorded it as "The Falling Tear" on their 2006 album Holy Heathens and the Old Green Man, arranged by Eliza Carthy; Martin Carthy's notes recall that A. L. Lloyd had passed it to the Watersons in the late 1970s for an earlier album, where it went unused.[6] On the dulcimer it is the final title listed in Mark Gilston's self-published Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers, a collection meant for ensembles in which everyone plays one piece but enters at a different moment.[7]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: When Jesus Wept".
- Britannica: "William Billings".
- Library of Congress Music Division blog: "Josiah Flagg and Paul Revere: Friends, Engravers, and Patriots".
- Hymnary.org: "When Jesus wept, the falling tear".
- Hymnary.org: "The Faith We Sing 2106. When Jesus Wept".
- Mainly Norfolk: "The Falling Tear".
- Mark Gilston: "Playing-A-Round With Dulcimers".
- Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Meeting of Christ with Martha and Mary after the Death of Lazarus, reed pen and brown ink and wash, c. 1662-65. The Cleveland Museum of Art.