Syncopated Hymns?

The Rev. W. G. Hargrave Thomas is in the best British tradition of unconventional vicars. In 1947 he publicly an that he saw no reason why unmarried women should be denied the joys of motherhood (his bishop made him take it back). Last year he began holding both Low Church and High Church services on Sunday and banned the reading of the Ten Commandments because of the "fantastic" morality of their "jealous God" (TIME, Feb. 28, 1949). Last week, in his 15th Century Anglican church in the village of Needham Market, Vicar Thomas was at it again. Because he found most hymn tunes "funereal, dull and too difficult to sing," he had dressed up the old Anglican hymn, Rest of the Weary, with the syncopated melody of a British bandleader's current theme song, Here's to the Next Time.

Vicar Thomas insists that there is nothing new about his experiment. The Roman Catholic Mass melody, Missa de Angelis, was once a popular folk dance, says Thomas, and the tune of the Protestant standby, Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending* was a great success a century ago when danced as a hornpipe at Sadler's Wells by a certain Miss Catley. He first got the idea himself as a missionary in Zanzibar some 25 years ago. The natives there, he discovered, flocked to his services when he began fitting hymns to their jungle rhythms.

For the natives of Needham Market, however, Vicar Thomas has learned to avoid making his jungle rhythms too up-to-date. "I must usually stay ten to 15 years behind popular trends in music," he explained last week. "It's still too early to even think of using Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'. That's a fine melody, though, and I do intend to use it someday."

* Which a brass band, provided by Oxford undergraduates, enthusiastically rendered when the university's Vice Chancellor, Dr. John Lowe, recently took off by helicopter for a speaking date.

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