There’s lots of thorny copyright issues of here, but I think it’d be a big step for Christian artists of all shades to figure out how to be more generous with their art.

And in turn, for the Church to be more generous in supporting them as they do so.

That’s a big shift from the way we tend of think of things now, but I think it would do all a lot of good in the ego department if we focused less on who wrote what song and more on support the artist who serve us.

Prepare yourselves for a shameless plug:

http://www.sojournmusic.com

As my friend Bobby Gilles has already said, copyright protection (and the concept of intellectual property in general) is a relatively new and very capitalistic idea. You’ll notice that the law on when something becomes public domain is continually extended – it’s about as old as Mickey Mouse, and you can be assured that when that window of time gets tight, the law will be extended again.

In terms of the question itself – consider what Isaac Watts did. Essentially – Watts did this very thing with his Psalms of David, which were theological and contextual interpretations of the Psalms. (They were contextual in the sense that they were very much in the vernacular of his community.) No one faults Watts when he did this to Psalms – inspired scripture. What makes the “canon” of Hymns more sacred than the “canon” of God’s word?

We can’t escape poor examples of this sort of thing, but there are excellent examples as well. We also can’t escape the fact that there are very bad examples of songs adapted from scripture – though those should, in principle, be more offensive!

I would argue that the hope remains that the “cream rises to the top” – the good examples will last the test of time and be a benefit to the church, and the poor examples will end up in the discount bin at the Christian Bookstore.

I think that on one end, its perfectly fine to change the lyrics of songs that don’t make sense today. After all, this isn’t the original Hebrew we’re talking about here. A Mighty Fortress could be updated with no problem ethically, so long as you kept Luther as the author. The problem with updating language comes with everyone knowing the song one way, even if they don’t understand it.

The best example that is culturally relevant to everyone is Christmas carols. Some language survives there that we really don’t understand, or at least have to ask about, and yet we don’t change the songs because it would be too difficult. “Angels We Have Heard On High” has a Latin chorus, which most people have to look up. “O Come All Ye Faithful” uses an archaic (if not completely obsolete) form of the word “you”. But who is going to change them? Even if you make the little change of “ye” to “you” in a song where that is seemingly insignificant, nobody is going to sing it that way. Another example is “What child is this”, where at least once a year, if you sing carols in church, you sing about where “ox and ass are feeding”. Despite causing the teenagers to giggle, there’s no way to really change it at this point – it doesn’t work with the song, and would require turning the song into a different song to update it. There is a cultural power in a popular song – its like a living snapshot into when it was written. Sure, it changes in little ways over the years, but if it is ubiquitous enough, the language will not tend to update. So if the secular culture doesn’t update songs that are meaningful to them, I don’t think the Christian culture will either.

In Come Thou Fount, I don’t think Ebenezer should be replaced. First off, its a proper name for something, not an archaic usage for something (like saying “God does not faint” when faint doesn’t mean what it used to). Even those who first sang the song had to know their Bibles to understand the reference.

I agree with what you’re saying. The fact that songs are being changed is not where the problem lies.

The unethicality comes in when a songwriter rewrites an old song, makes money from it, then turns around and says no one can change what he’s done with it to make money from it.

If he’s against people doing that, then he’s a hypocrite for doing it in the first place.

I may be oversimplifying, but it smacks of the unforgiving servant.

Only in the last century, in our modern era of copyright protection and music as Big Business has it become thought of as strange or unethical to change older songs and folk ballads or write new songs based on older ones. Folk artists have always done this. Dylan did quite a bit of this on his latest album, “Modern Times,” as he always has.

Again, it depends on who is doing the revision, the extent of the revision, and how skillfully they go about it. I don’t feel like there is anything wrong with writing a song based on an old hymn and saying “written by ____, based on the hymn by ____.” If you just edit and revise some thees and thous, then of course it would be less appropriate to give yourself a writing credit.

I think that’s completely up-to-snuff.

Or even with movies there are remakes, including, for example, the American Christmas Carol starring Henry Winkler as Scrooge, It’s a Wonderful Life with Marlo Thomas as a female version of George Bailey (I’m not sure if they kept the same title for that one). For our Christmas and Easter dramas at church, the program will say that the script it based on a play by someone else. I think it should be the same for music and lyrics based on someone else’s work.

I have great difficulty with claiming the finished work as a new copyright and collecting royalties from it.

Many years ago, I felt very strongly compelled to write two additional verses to Jack Hayford’s “Majesty” for our local church. Someone suggested sending Jack a courtesy copy, which resulted in my receiving a very encouraging letter from him. He also reassured me that I wasn’t the first one to do this. I would have been thrilled if the thing had gone into wider use, but if I were eligible for royalties, I probably would want them directed to a charity or to Jack’s ministry, since the essence of the song was all his own.

i would stress that we need to be talking about and explaining lyrics before we sing them, so we understand to some degree the depth of truth in them, and so words and phrases that seem unfamiliar we can sing with earnest, rather than just repeating words from a page or screen.

for music, i’m more flexible with, though i’d try to know the original melody and harmony and find music that fits the same tone and structure of it. if a song is somber and heart-wrenching, a light and fluffy melody or a hip-hop beat probably won’t fit the idea of the song.

overall, write your own music if you want to do something. use the creativity God has given you for yourself, rather than trying to improve on someone else’s work. pulling from other people’s work is one thing (e.g. using lyrics based off the Bible); trying to just alter someone else’s work is another. so if you must change a song, don’t claim it to be the same thing, but rather make it your own new thing. that’s my two cents, anyway.

This could be a fun thread: weird hymn words.

Whenever I’d see “bro’t” I used to switch into rap mode.

also, some of the my favorite hymns are actually originally swedish, german, or celtic, but were translated into english. it’s the same sort of idea, isn’t it? usually i think both get credit.

http://www.michaelkrahn.com/music/MP3/She%20Remembers.mp3

“Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief”

And I think Dylan would agree… since he has always borrowed generously from the past and present (and who knows, maybe the future).

ED: I have to take issue with your statement:
“I think that a lyricist who has been working with a tune in mind, and the best ones all do…”

That is simply not true. Sometimes a song springs from poetry written years earlier. I guess it depends on who you consider “the best ones” but in the genre that I’m a part of there are any number of ways a song gets written. Sometimes the music suggest a lyric and sometimes the lyric suggests a melody.

However, I absolutely agree that we as songwriters “use the dynamics of the music to amplify and augment the emotional or intellectual qualities of the words, so sometimes music and lyrics have to be taken together artistically.”

Were I to cross from land to land
Or sail afar by sea
Descend the depths or climb the heights
My Lord remains with me

Before the blood ran in these veins
The days ordained for me
Were written in your book O Lord
Before I came to be

I grieve to hear your enemies
Speak hatred Lord, of You
Long though they scheme with ill-intent
Their days are numbered too

How precious are your thoughts to me
How countless, Lord, they are
More than the shores have grains of sand
More than the skies have stars

Come search and test this heart, O lord
Dispel each anxious thought
And lead me onward evermore
To tread the path I ought

How blessed am I, so bound with love
Surrounded, yet so free
In doubt or blessing, life or death
My Lord remains with me.

It’s clearly a song inspired out of Psalm 139. Does Greg get the “co-author” credit or do we stick David down as “Author”? I think that to call it David’s work is to do the bible a disservice, as his song had more in it. Having said that, it is hard to sing the original version in the modern idiom, since most of us lack the Hebrew, and we haven’t got a recording of the original music.

I hope that wouldn’t offend the original author. I tried to respect what he had written and prevent misunderstandings in the modern day.

Honestly, though, end of the day, I care a lot less about respecting the author than I do about God-glorifying music that benefits the Church.