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Monthly column on hymns and songs

The vocabulary in Scripture is always fresh - and half of it has never been sung

'So what did you sing at school, Daddy?' I cannot remember anyone asking me that, but sometimes the changing face of classroom choruses has an uncanny resemblance to the kinds of songs we all sing on Sundays.

Among early memories of junior school are some rousing renditions of 'The Farmer's Boy', 'Strawberry Fair' and 'The Mermaid': 'One Friday morn when we set sail and the ship not far from land . . .' What made these quasi-folk songs such a hit? We were suburban kids as far from the farm and the fair as from the sea. We recognised such things, but hardly equated any of the girls we knew (like Fatty's sister) with the pretty maids in the lyrics. From today's perspective, they had nothing whatever in them which resonated with our experience. They worked because of some rousing tunes, strong story-lines, highly visual language, and the sheer singability that comes through hard labour to blend text and tune perfectly together.

Skiffle

But soon skiffle was with us, and some awareness of its roots in traditional jazz. Whatever commercial forces shaped our tastes, the class of 53 knew that real music wasn't in an English country garden, but came from New Orleans. We were right there with the chain gang on the railroad by the Mississippi, but because our best friend had just taken our girl to St. Louis, we were about to end it all in jail with a bottle and a smoking gun. We knew more about geography than sex; how times change.

Our experience? Hardly a trace. If melody had taken a back seat to rhythm, the vivid stories were still there, with tragic undertones which made our strumming deadly serious. No one sang about London; 'London's burning' was for the infant's party, 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner' for the pensioners' club. Above all, we didn't sing about school, homework, football, bikes, Mum and Dad, or Bromley High Street. Music was about America's southern states 30 to 100 years ago.

Then came the Beatles. Back came the tunes-stop me if I'm over-simplifying-but for the first time in our lives, the Britain we knew was in the songs- and not just Liverpool. It was a massive shift in perception which helped us to keep on singing after skiffle was as dead as Strawberry Fair.

Compared with church

Now come to church with me. If you come at Christmas, Strawberry Fair lives again, with folksy sentiment which gets by for the same reason that it always has: 'This star drew nigh to the north-west', Nowell, Fol-dee-dee. It even dresses up as high culture and turns up, annually, at King's, Cambridge. Touchdown to everyday life-nil.

Perhaps surprisingly, the New Orleans characters survive, arrayed in religious clothing. The predictable songs about Calvary, the Lamb and the Throne are uncannily similar in this respect: they are content with the cliches. These are the required themes of sacred music. There is no need to look for fresh ways of exploring the language; it's all there in the Bible. Result -the charm of distance, and all its irrelevance. Such writers are slow to see that in Scripture the vocabulary is always fresh. The metal is as old as the hills and quarried from them, but the coinage is newly-minted for each generation. The half of it has never been sung.

And those Beatles? My age betrays me; let others interpret their successors who top today's charts. We still need Christian songwriters who can face Mondays, weave stories, paint pictures, compose tunes that fit like a glove, and work at their craft until they get it exactly right.

Christopher Idle