Here’s a revised version of a song that proved less than successful at last week’s singing. The text is by the Puritan Thomas Dudley, who was father of the better-known American Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. The original poem included eight-syllable lines (ll. 1-14, and l. 20) as well as ten-syllable lines (ll.15-19). In the song below, I used only eight-syllable lines for a Long Meter Doubled song (or more properly, Long Meter with refrain). The first verse comprises lines 1-4 of the original; second verse, lines 11-14; chorus, lines 5-6 and 9-10. (You can find the original poem in full in Anne Bradstreet and her time, by Helen Stuart Campbell, chapter XIII, “Chances and Changes,” p. 268.)
The title of the music refers to the town of Colma, just south of San Francisco. Because cemeteries are prohibited within the city limits of San Francisco, a great many San Franciscans wound up being buried in one of Colma’s seventeen cemeteries. According to the 2000 U.S. census, the population of Colma is 1,191; around 1.5 million bodies are buried in the town’s cemeteries.
Update: I presented this song again during the “other book” singing on 6 December, and it went well — except for the fact that I led the first verse completely wrong, because I tried to lead it using the rhythm that I had discarded in the earlier version. It’s pretty embarrassing when you wrote the piece, and you can’t even lead it right!
