Our Word of the Week is farmer, so it’s fitting for us to choose a hymn to cheer the hearts of those who work the soil. “But,” you say, “it’s January! Nobody’s going to plow the soil in January.” Well, nobody will who lives in the north temperate zone and above. In the tropics or in Australia or Brazil or Argentina, a good lot of soil-working will …

Hello out there, all you who embody our Word of the Week! My father, who by preference sold insurance in the rural counties east and south and north of us rather than in our own urban and suburban county, always liked farmers, for their friendliness and their quite literally down-to-earth ways. The feeling was mutual, and that’s why he became so su…

Sometimes a Song is hanging out in the deep recesses of the brain, and perhaps has been there for decades until something brings it to mind. That’s one of the reasons I decided when we began Word & Song to link my weekly column to Tony’s Word of the Week — to stir my brain cells up a bit and shake out a song I might otherwise not have thought of. O…

From the Brothers Grimm, those great historians and linguists and collectors of folk stories from all over the German-speaking lands, we’ve got a story about a funny little man, half helpful and half malicious, who has a secret he manages to keep until his own glee gets the better of him! Enjoy this one with the children, and please let us know if …

The scene is a bright borderland between heaven and a drab city below. One of the blest, a cheery Scotsman named George, has come down from the regions of bliss to meet our narrator and to teach him the secrets of genuine joy and love, human and divine. They’re secrets, not because God hides them, but because we human beings, such as we are, have w…

The author of our Hymn of the Week, John Keble, was the sort of man it is hard to imagine outside of the nineteenth century, and that is to the credit of his age. His father was an Anglican minister, devout, intelligent, highly cultured, and satisfied with a modest vicarage in Gloucestershire, in the lovely surroundings of the Cotswolds. The elder …

Here at Sometimes a Song I’ve often commented that the great flowering of American popular music in the mid-twentieth century came about as a result of the convergence of talents and circumstances, and sometimes of hardship or happenstance. This week’s selection is an example of such a song. “It Was a Very Good Year” was far from the first song wri…

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a poem that schoolchildren once loved, and that has given us the idea of the “albatross around the neck,” the punishment that attends to the Ancient Mariner in our ballad today, because without any motivation, he had so little regard for the beautiful creature of God that he shot it, for no reason but that he could. T…

We’ve had illness in our family for the past week, so the New Year, 2025, is off to a rocky start. I had in mind a lovely Grammy-winning song to share for Sometimes a Song, but — sort of the way Kurt Weill describes it in his beautiful “September Song” — time got away from me. So I will leave you with a mystery song to look for next week. Some of o…

Christmastide is still here, and so are our Christmas offers at Word & Song! Upgrade Now or Give a Gift The more we’ve seen of films made either in England or the United States during that Golden Age, from about 1935 to 1965, the more it strikes us that a lot of them were set at Christmastime, and of those, quite a few were not about getting presen…

Christmastide is still here, and so are our Christmas offers at Word & Song! Upgrade or Gift at Special Rate I’ve long heard that we have no idea at what time of year Jesus was born, but here is one argument — there are others, based in early Christian calendars — for making it wintertime. It’s a simple one. When the angel spoke to Zachariah, he wa…