This week’s song is “I Saw a Mighty Angel Fly”. Click here for music and audio player.
Scriptures for this song:
Revelation 14:6-7 This song seems to give us a little more insight into these verses from the book of Revelation.
D&C 133:36-39, 52-53
Various facts:
Text by Anonymous (around 1840)
Music is an English melody arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)Tune name is Forest Green
The story behind the song:
This song was originally sung to a different tune, but it was a difficult one, so it was used only as a choir hymn. When the new tune was chosen to accompany it, everything would have been perfect except for one thing. The tune was twice as long as a verse and the song had an odd number of verses. In order to make it work, the final verse was doubled in length, the new portion drawing from the same scriptures in Revelation. It is not known who the writer of the text is, which makes it difficult to actually get to the story behind it. It has been presumed that it was written in England somewhere around 1840.
I am doing a little research online to find these things out. I also have a book entitled "Our Latter-day Hymns The Stories and the Messages" by Karen Lynn Davidson from which I am finding information on these songs. If you want more info, the aforementioned book and the internet search engines can get you much more than the little bit I shared.
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