British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?

Subject: British Grenadiers — Sheffield, why?
From: Haruo
Date: 10 Oct 00 - 05:37 PM

In the Northern-Baptist/Disciples-of-Christ tradition* the tune known to the rest of the world as "The British Grenadiers" is used as a hymn tune (most notably for Montgomery's Hail to the Lord's Anointed) and is called SHEFFIELD. I'm wondering how it got this monicker as a hymn tune.

I learned the hymn to this tune as a Baptist kid from the Baptist/Disciples' Christian Worship: A Hymnal (1941), and I see the Disciples are still using it in their fascinating 1995 Chalice Hymnal.

Roger from Sheffield's name suggested the query to me. I think I'll post my Jonah oratorio soon, which also uses this tune.

Liland

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers — Sheffield, why?
From: mousethief
Date: 10 Oct 00 - 05:45 PM

Most hymn tunes with place-names are named because of where they were written, or where their composer hailed from. Do we know who wrote this melody?

(obligatory thread-creep: Is there a difference between a tune, a melody, and an air?)

Alex
O..O
=o=

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Sep 13 - 11:50 PM

George Frederick Root was born at Sheffield, Massachusetts

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 30 Sep 13 - 01:26 AM

Root wrote the tune we now generally think of as "Jesus loves the little children", but I'm not sure he has any connection with the tune called SHEFFIELD ("British Grenadiers"). FWIW there's a quite different tune called SHEFFIELD in one of the fasola tunebooks (not sure if I've seen it in the 1991 Sacred Harp or the 2012 Shenandoah Harmony. Will look it up.

I think the "British Grenadiers" tune is anonymous, and quite a bit too old to have been written by Root, though I suppose there's a chance he did an arrangement of it, quite possibly a hymnal arrangement, and perhaps he might have had a hand in introducing it into American hymnodic usage paired with the Montgomery "Hail to the Lord's Anointed" text...

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Mo the caller
Date: 30 Sep 13 - 04:39 AM

It may fit the syllables but to me the tune the (English) Baptists use fits the sense of the words much better than the ra-ra Brit Grenadiers tune.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: gnomad
Date: 30 Sep 13 - 04:45 AM

Lyrics of the British Grenadiers refer to the use shock troops equipped with grenades, wearing caps, pouches and louped clothes. All indicating 18th century origin, as does reference to fusees. This does presuppose that words and tune are contemporaneous.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 30 Sep 13 - 06:50 AM

It was very common for compilers of hymn tune collections to rename tunes for places near the their own location. So I would guess this tune was used as a hymn by somebody from West Yorkshire. Diehl's hymn tune index should say when that name was first used for it.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 02 Oct 13 - 05:41 PM

Here is the George F. Root tune called SHEFFIELD, obviously completely unrelated to "British Grenadiers".

I don't have a copy of Diehl's Index, and in the hymnary.org database the oldest instance of the name SHEFFIELD with the Brit Gren tune is from the 1941 Northern Baptist/Disciples of Christ Christian Worship. FWIW.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: IanC
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 04:42 AM

One very common practice, when using traditional tunes in hymn compilations was (and probably still is) to use the name of the place the contributor heard or collected the tune as its title. See, for example Monks Gate ...

When Ralph Vaughan Williams was commissioned at the start of the 20th century to edit a new hymnal as an alternative to Hymns Ancient and Modern, he set John Bunyan's hymn, in an adaptation by Percy Dearmer, to his own adaptation of the tune of an English folk song Valiant or Welcome Sailor which he had collected from Mrs Harriet Verrall of Monk's Gate, Sussex.

:-)

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 05:18 AM

I don't think that's common at all - in fact I can't think of any other example. Hymn tune arrangers very rarely collected their tunes.

The West Gallery collections have clumps of tunes named for villages around England, each clump surrounding the arranger's home town. But the tunes could be from anywhere. There are a few Scottish collections where the tunes are named after Edinburgh streets, but some of them came from central Europe decades or centuries before.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Mo the caller
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 06:06 AM

The cyber hymnal suggests 5 tunes for this hymn.
The one I was thinking of upthread was Cruger.
I may also have sung it to Ellacombe (why was he born so beautiful)
But never to British Grenadiers or the other 2

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: IanC
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 07:49 AM

Hi

There are, as I said, any number of hymn tunes associated with the place they were collected these ... ones that spring to mind include:

Lord Of All Hopefulness/Be Thou My Vision - Slane
Morning Has Broken - Bunessan
When a Knight Won His Spurs - Stowey
O Little Town Of Bethlehem - Forest Green

If we include tunes written with known composers where the same convention was used, there are a whole load more (e.g.):

Amazing Grace - Arlington (Arne)
The Two Fatherlands - Thaxted (Holst)
While Shepherds Watched (later used for Ilkley Moor Bar t'at) - Cranbrook
Come Down O Love Divine - Down Ampney (Vaughan Williams)
At The Name Of Jesus - Kings Weston (Vaughan Williams)
etc. etc. etc.

Ian

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST,highlandman at work
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 10:00 AM

Jack, I don't think Ian was using the term 'collect' to refer to 'original' field collection necessarily, but rather some association the hymnal editor made with the tune. There is definitely a pattern of that. William Walker certainly named a lot of the folk tunes he used in Southern Harmony that way. It may not have been a place either the tune or the editor ever went to (e.g. Kedron in the 1940 Episcopal hymnal), but some association in the editor's mind at the time.
And the tune names are of course not definitive; a tune can appear as one name in one hymnal and (sometimes slightly altered) as another name in the next.
-Glenn

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 10:41 AM

The mention of "Monksgate" suggested the other tunes were named the same way. "Bunessan" wasn't - as in the more common pattern, it was named for a place near where it was first used as a hymn, not where it was first known from. (We've had a long thread about "Bunessan", and its origins got pretty murky and complicated).

So it looks like the only hymn composer ever to do what Ian described was RVW.

Anyway, there is no reason to think the "British Grenadiers" tune came from Sheffield.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 03 Oct 13 - 11:51 PM

Since the use of "British Grenadiers" as a Christian hymn tune appears to be of American origin, I think it's more than likely that the Sheffield in question is one of the eight thus-named towns in the United States rather than the Cornish (or the Australian or New Zealand) Sheffield. Perhaps I'll inquire of the denominational musicians' associations, maybe somebody there has some idea how this tune name was acquired.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 04 Oct 13 - 12:55 AM

The Cornish Sheffield is a v small village. Our main Sheffield is a huge industrial city in Yorkshire, pretty well right the other end of England, presumably the one in question on this thread. But I agree there are several in US also which might be germane.

~M~

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST,Triplane
Date: 04 Oct 13 - 09:36 AM

Wikipedia British Grenadiers
Tune history from Early 1700s
Extract
In 20th-century Northern (US) Baptist and Disciples of Christ hymnals, the tune, called SHEFFIELD, or SHEFFIELD (ENGLISH) to distinguish it from other tunes named SHEFFIELD, is commonly set to the text "Hail to the Lord's Anointed" by James Montgomery.[

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 04 Oct 13 - 11:50 AM

Thanks, Triplane. In all likelihood I am the author of that Wikipedia extract. ;-)

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 04 Oct 13 - 11:53 AM

MtheGM, I actually knew Sheffield was in Yorkshire, just forgot to put it in the list, which should have read "rather than the Yorkshire (or the Cornish, Australian or New Zealand) Sheffield".

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 04 Oct 13 - 01:35 PM

This is from a biography of James Montgomery:

http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/m/o/n/montgomery_j.htm

When Montgomery was five years old, his fam­i­ly moved to the Mo­rav­i­an set­tle­ment at Grace­hill, near Bal­ly­mena, Coun­ty An­trim. Two years lat­er, he was sent to the Ful­neck Sem­in­ary in York­shire. He left Ful­neck in 1787 to work in a shop in Mir­field, near Wake­field. Soon tir­ing of that, he se­cured a sim­i­lar po­si­tion at Wath, near Rother­ham, on­ly to find it as un­suit­a­ble as his pre­vi­ous job. A trip to Lon­don, hop­ing to find a pub­lish­er for his youth­ful po­ems, end­ed in fail­ure. In 1792, he glad­ly left Wath for Shef­field to be assistant to Mr. Gales, auc­tion­eer, book­sel­ler, and print­er of the Shef­field Reg­is­ter. In 1794, Gales left Eng­land to avoid po­lit­ic­al prosecu­tion. Mont­gom­ery took the Shef­field Reg­is­ter in hand, changed its name to the Shef­field Iris, and con­tin­ued to ed­it it for 32 years. Dur­ing the next two years he was imprisoned twice, first for re­print­ing a song in com­mem­or­a­tion of the fall of the Bas­tille, then for giving an ac­count of a ri­ot in Shef­field.

That gives a fairly strong hint about who might be responsible for the name.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 06 Oct 13 - 01:42 AM

Jack, I don't see any reason to think Montgomery ever thought of using "British Grenadiers" as a hymn tune, but it's true that whoever named it very likely had the Montgomery—Sheffield connection in mind. Thanks!

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST,Triplane
Date: 07 Oct 13 - 06:47 AM

YW Haruo

Subject: Montgomery–Sheffield–Iris–Gloria–Woodward–Heath–&c
From: Haruo
Date: 07 Oct 13 - 11:54 AM

I don't know what YW means, Triplane.

To digress for a moment here, though, another Montgomery-related folk tune used in hymnals is the French carol whose usual French first line goes "Les anges dans nos campagnes". This tune is generally called IRIS in British hymnals, because it first gained hymnic currency as the tune for Montgomery's "Angels from the realms of glory". In the USA that hymn is almost always sung to REGENT SQUARE, while a variant of IRIS usually called GLORIA or GLORIA (Barnes) [for the arranger, Edward Shippen Barnes] is used for English versions of the French Christmas carol, most commonly "Angels we have heard on high", less commonly Woodward's "Shepherds, in the field abiding", apparently a translation of a Latin text, Quem vidistis, pastores, used in the matins service on Christmas Day. Whether the French is also a translation of the matins responsory I don't know. In his interesting Christmas carol collection Joy of Christmas, former UK prime minister Edward Heath sets another text, beginning "When the crimson sun had set", to GLORIA.

FWIW

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST,Triplane
Date: 07 Oct 13 - 02:42 PM

You're Welcome x2

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 08 Oct 13 - 02:44 AM

Oh, of course. U2, Triplane! ;-)

Incidentally, in case anyone is wondering about the "Jonah Oratorio" song using the BritGren tune, which I referred to in the inaugural post in this thread 13 years ago, it is here.

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Mo the caller
Date: 08 Oct 13 - 05:16 AM

quote
"This tune is generally called IRIS in British hymnals, because it first gained hymnic currency as the tune for Montgomery's "Angels from the realms of glory". "

Of course
???????

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: GUEST,Jack Campin
Date: 08 Oct 13 - 06:13 AM

According to the Cyberhymnal, the Iris was the Sheffield newspaper that Montgomery ran, and the hymn was first published in it, in 1816.

So it's obvious really.

Maybe there are other hymn tunes called "Daily Worker", "National Enquirer" or "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung".

Subject: RE: British Grenadiers-why is tune called Sheffield?
From: Haruo
Date: 08 Oct 13 - 11:21 AM

Thanks, Jack, both for the clarification for Mo the caller and for the laugh.

Haruo