Tune
The tune was written by Joseph Brackett (1797–1882) who first joined the Shakers at Gorham, Maine, when his father's farm helped to form the nucleus of a new Shaker settlement.
A manuscript of Mary Hazzard of the New Lebanon, New York, Shaker community records this original version of the melody:
The song quite closely resembles several repetitions of the opening measures of William Byrd's renaissance composition, "The Barley Break', which Byrd intended to imitate country children playing a folk game. Similarly, Brackett is claimed to have come up with the song as an imitation of what folk music sounds like.
Read more about this topic: Simple Gifts
Famous quotes containing the word tune:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“Refuse them!
If we too miss out, don’t create our lives,
invent or deeds, do them, dance
a tune with our own feet,
we shall thirst in Hades,
in the blood of our children.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“If you will play from a copy of a tune that is choppy,
You’ll get all my applause.”
—Irving Berlin (1888–1989)