O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mournI was going to link a Youtube video of it, but there are more versions than I care to spend time listening to, and none had quite the feel of the one I remembered.
O Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep
Some of these mornings bright and fair
Take my wings and cleave the air
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary, don't you weep
When I get to heaven goin' to sing and shout
Nobody there for turn me out
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep
When I get to Heaven goin' to put on my shoes
Run about glory and tell all the news
Pharaoh's army got drowned
O Mary don't you weep
I remember being puzzled by the refrain. Did it mean that Jesus' mother should stop weeping because Pharoah's men were dead (long before she was born--and weren't they taking shelter in Egypt???), or saying that this is good news and she should not start weeping, or asking if she's sad that so many went to hell? Clues were there (made pretty explicit by other lyrics not in the short version), but I didn't make the connection of Miriam=Mary until years later. Oh yeah--a spiritual, slave days, oppressor defeated and freedom arrives--stop crying.
A number of popular hymns confused me too. "My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!" Hmm. I thought sin was supposed to be bad? I learned the song before I could read. With a few more years to understand convoluted sentences, and finally reading the punctuation(*), I get it now.
And they weren't even trying to make things confusing!
(*) I often run slides for the songs at church. They generally come without any punctuation whatever. I leave to your imagination how the complex sentences read in that form, before I get ahold of them.
1 comment:
I was pondering this just two weeks ago in church with one of the older hymns - very clear meaning if you read it as prose, but the meter tends to obscure that because of the nested clauses. Yet for clarity in my own writing I would tend to edit it into multiple standalone sentences. My bosses boss hated one of my bigger works of academic writing because it was too easy to understand.
I've always been particularly annoyed by "may it be a sweet, sweet sound, . . . in your rear". WTF was the lyricist thinking it would sound like? "You alone are my heart's desire, And I long to worship Thee" is another one - couldn't they decide whether to be modern or archaic with their second-person-singular pronouns and stick with the choice? Why do they need to keep switching back between "You" and "Thou/Thee"?
I commend you for fixing the text on the slides. When I had the task of organizing that we seemed to have a slide-source that reveled in putting hyphens in the worst possible places for being misleading until the next line showed up. I can't believe that it wasn't intentional, as it was so consistent.
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