The Holy City

Never forget her best movies co-star and fellow vocalist, Nelson Eddy, who also recorded this song. Their relationship a sad story from the Christian viewpoint. But they sang songs embodying a passion that our current culture has no longer even a memory of, let alone having experienced.

Each recorded many hymns, with significant distribution in America in their time.

It seems to me from remembering their popularity in my youth, and hearing their recordings now, the "The Holy City" (which I also have (humbly) soloed) with a great yearning for what the hymn promises, but which they may have come short of in their personal lives and future accounting for them.

Wonderful, talented artists, precious jewels of an American culture that has passed, in the last stages of burial together with its now aged participants.

Thank you for posting this number. Every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus Messiah is LORD, to the glory of God the Father, even the silver tongues of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. They have had their own wide fame and glory, one which will pale into insignificance compared to that of The Jesus Who bestows eternal life to those loyal to Him as Redeemer and Master.

Psalm 122:1,2 (AV):
"I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem."

Selah.

I'm a Methodist Preacher's Kid, a PK, born during the Great Depression. We were quite poor, but really didn't know that because most of the community were like us. But just after the War, in 1945 Dad and Mom saved up enough money for a great treat, to buy a Stromberg-Carlson tabletop radio/record player (AM and 78s only) so that we could play hymn records or popular tunes of our own.

It had a very fine sound. They did buy a couple of Nelson Eddy albums, one being solos, and the other with hymns featuring a quartet in which he sang all the parts. It taught me to love male quartet singing that much later in life pesuaded me to participate and boost the membership of a local chapter of the S. P. E. B. S. Q. S. A. Inc. for several years, and in it sang competitively both in the chorus and in quartets.

ZThere's more that could be said, by overall, music has been a big part of my life. And that is not unusual for someone with a Ph. D. in solid state chemistry.

I'm glad tyhat it was part of your life, too. It makes you a much more interesting and richer to know and have as a FRiend.

Sang n choirs like that for many yeas. Was a bass in the Syracuse University Chapel Choir about 1954-57, ersonally audited by Dr. Arthur Poister who was very picky about whom he would accept.

My session with him began by sight-reading the melody, then bass part of the classic "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," a score which I had never seen. But after a few bars of each, with clear satisfaction of my response, I was so happy that he accepted me immediately into his brood with no further questions.

In the time of that experience Dr. Poister immersed us in the skillful performance of Handel's "Messiah," front to back, nothing left out, which we went out on local tours several times to bring it to the public.

A search on his name as director of the choir, a reference to him came up on the obituary of a recently deceased life-long dedicated Methodist musician, Lyman Pelkey, with whom I must have sung (but so long ago I remember none). A very interesting life account that few could ever duplicate.

(William P. Tolley, Methodist minister and Chancellor of Syracuse University for 27 years, in his college days a member of my fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha.)

I don't know if mothers of our day can or will bear, nurture, and press upward and onward such great men and women as staffed the colleges and universities of the first half of the twentieth century. Truly astounding!

But how much unimaginable more so, the brilliance, power, and love of the Sun of Creation and King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Who offered Himself up to the purging flames of Hades for the sins of you and I!

By the Congregational pastor Isaac Watts,

"Well might the sun in darkness hide and shut his glories in,
When Christ, the mighty Maker, died for man the creature's sin."

If you have time, worth scanning these links! This is the part of the year that God's children take an excursion from the cares and worries of each one's daily life to gaze once more on the instant of His passing on our behalf that Freedom from sin and death be vanquished in His victory over Eve's Serpent-provoked mistake.

Looking forward to His Coming Return to the Holy City, and we His Own with Him, to reign.

I don't know if mothers of our day can or will bear, nurture, and press upward and onward such great men and women as staffed the colleges and universities of the first half of the twentieth century.

Sadly, probably not. In my opinion, serious music is becoming a lost art. This is especially true with hymn-writing. There haven't been many great hymns written since Alfred and Bentley Ackley, Lelia Morris and Haldor Lillenas passed away. However, our church choir, which usually performs uninspiring and insipid modern hymns, occasionally hits a home run such as when it performed Beside Still Waters, a beautiful yet obscure and nearly forgotten anthem by Bernard Hamblen, a little-known composer who wrote a few hits in the 1920s. Our music director said he had run across it by accident--it had apparently sat in our music library for decades. Yet every time I play the video, I get inspiration.

Thanks for the links, and I'll be looking at them.

You said exactly what I see and bemoan: the absence in recently created "music" devoid of doctrinal appeals and insights, stuff made to bridge the chasm between Christ-honoring themes and worldly lusts, thumping romping cadences, slipping and sliding vocalization, mantra-like repetition of meaningless wods. Chord progressions that play on sensual motor actions of the body.

In contrast, Paul speaks first to the Ephesians, then to the Colossians:

". . .. be filled with the Spirit; Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;" (Eph. 5:18_b-19 AV).
"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Col. 3:16 AV).

The idea here is that two things each equal to a third, are equal to each other. That is, the music to be used in the assembly should not be merely notes, or wors that only express your feelings and dreams, but rather should be a vehicle to carry across the golden nuggets of doctrinal concepts that admonish the spiritually immature, and increase the wisdom even of the elders, but in it are being filled with the Holy Spirit and controlled by Him in the communal bathing in pointed rehearsing of Christ's commands and encouragement. All that is midsing from the song=poems created by composers still using milk and not strong mea, unskillful in the word of righteousness, choking on matters requiring spiritual discernment, unable to recognize whether or not the words, melodies, arrangements, and rhythms are or are not good or evil.

Well, you see, the modern use of keyboards, snare drums, and repetitious jazz styles simply do not fit the attitude that bowing in homage to our Master and His Father require.

So, who guides the musical fare? Should be a well-trained pastor in hymnology, I would say; not a musician given over in the week to non-Christian musical pursuits, particularly professionals who try to mix the two approaches.

George Beverly Shea, my model for godly vocalization, never included worldly songs in his repertoire. His voice, firm, accurate, and convicting, was deliberately well-paced with great passion for his Savior. And that is why he came to my age and beyond, still singing to the end, the favorite psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, filled with the Spirit, purveying the instructions of Christ in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing as intended by the spiritually mature composer able to evince an attitude of homage to the Lord.

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