Re: Davvening music

[Daniel Walker <walker...>]

Tue, 03 Jan 1995 jrsmith (at) beckman(dot)win-uk(dot)net (Jeffrey R. Smith) 
wrote:
>Matthew Fields mentioned that his niece sings Adon Olam to the tune of
>Achey Brakey Heart. We sometimes sing it to the tune of 'John Brown's Body'.

Testing the scansion, I kept wandering out of 'John Brown's Body' and into
'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'. I apparently lived in Texas too darn
long! The present Hey class kids at the Conservative schul in Knoxville, TN
are fond of singing Adon Olam to the tune of 'Rocky-top', the school song
of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. (It was pretty scarry to hear
some folks in the congregation say, "Isn't that cute; they've learned to
sing 'Rocky-top' in Hebrew." I can only hope they were non-Jewish guests at
the bar-mitzvah that week!)

I think someone tried 'Little Brown Jug', but I can't remember the verse to
hear if the scansion works. This, of course, was not in schul.

>Each year the Anglo Jewish Ex-Servicemen's Association hold a Remembrance
>Service in November to commemorate those who fell while fighting in both
>World Wars. Several years ago, one of the tunes they played in all
>innocence was part of one of Bach's cantatas. The then Chief Rabbi, Lord
>Jacobovitz, remarked 'What a lovely tune. What is it?' The answer was
>provided by one of the representatives of Her Majesty's Government, who
>attend the ceremony every year. 'It's 'Jesu joy of man's desiring',
>although why you're playing it at a Jewish parade is beyond me.' A lovely
>story and absolutely true.

OUCH!

In the insensitive to the point of stupidity department, (back in Houston,
TX, of course)....

The Klein school district (a German area of Texas in the NNW suburbs of
Houston) opened a new high school back in 1979 from which I graduated in
1983. For the football team's fight song, they picked a harmless section of
'New Colonial March' (I think that's K.L. King, but I'm not sure.), but for
the school song, they wanted something German to reflect the heritage of
the area. You guessed it, I was stuck through four years of playing
clarinet while the student body sang some doggrel composed by the school's
first principal to the tune of 'Deutschland ueber Alles'.

To the best of my knowledge, there has not yet been any significant
campaign to get it changed even to this day.


BTW, Jeffrey, Is there any chance you could format your postings for the
least common denominator on the internet - 80 column monospaced terminals.
It's difficult to read your postings on primative equipment when the
line-breaks happen at staggered intervals. (And it's slightly inconvenient
to reformat the text for a quoted reply.) Thanx.

---
The simplest way to stop a flamewar is to breathe deeply, swallow
your bile and just LET an idiot have the last word. - me
Daniel Walker - walker (at) usit(dot)net - Quark XPress (QUARKXPR) list co-owner