This is a nostalgia song that I fell in love with at church camp after seventh grade. You will note that this is an age that is hard to pack with much nostalgia, as "the friends of my childhood" are in point of strict fact, my friends of this afternoon. Yet I caught the spirit of it, as CS Lewis caught the Sehnsucht of "a biscuit tin filled with moss" even as a boy.
It acquired a nostalgia as I went along. The girls at camp sang a descant beginning on the second verse of the song, and I don't think I had heard that before. I was ensorceled, grasping the idea that had eluded me in childen's choir that singing in harmony could be done by untrained singers not reading from a page. Life changed.
None of my male friends nor the girls I dated in highschool knew the song, but in college it seemed they all did. I felt I had landed in the right place. The girl I married was particularly fond of it and we would sing it together in the car. In harmony, of course.
We sang it again in late 1979, nights and days in a row when my first son went into the hospital and hovered on the edge of death for almost a week; we were bequeathing him the only culture we had. Because of that association, we sang it seldom thereafter. Our oldest son vaguely recalled it (not from when he was two weeks old), the second one did not recognise it. This seemed odd to me, because I have hummed it often all these years. But I see where we might not have fully embraced a song which had brushed death for us.
Nostalgia is now our chosen land, and the Welsh are very good at that.
8 comments:
Good song. The beginning notes remind me of Flow Gently Sweet Afton, though the melody soon deviates from it.
That was lovely. I'd never heard it before.
I'd never heard those words, but yes, at the upper left of "The Master has Come and He Calls Us" it says "Ash Grove."
And all the ashes are dying, now.
Yes, the emerald ash borer is spreading. Rejoice when the temperature gets to 20 below.
There's an ash that threatens my daughter's garage, but the owner isn't eager to cut it down right now.
You could send him articles about the emerald ash borer.
He knows. Two things may have a bearing: it wouldn't be cheap, and the tree trunk has the other end of his dog run cable attached to it. And it isn't quite dead--there were a couple of dozen leaves on it this year.
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