No. 106 Praise God, Osh 528
Hexatonic, mode 2 A (I II 3 IV V — 7)
Oh, for a heart to praise my God, A heart from sin set free;
A heart that’s sprinkled with his blood, So freely shed for me,
Oh, for a heart submissive, meek;
Oh, for a heart submissive, meek, My great Redeemer’s throne,
Where only Christ is heard to speak, Where Jesus reigns alone.
Oh, for an humble, contrite heart, believing, true and clean,
Which neither life nor death can part from him that dwells within.
A heart in every thought renewed, and full of love divine;
Perfect, and right, and pure, and good, a copy, Lord, of thine.
Seaborn M. Denson composed this tune as a setting to Charles Wesley’s text and inserted it, in a fuguing-tune setting, in the Original Sacred Harp of 1911. The tune is testimony to the fact that its composer was steeped in the traditional Anglo-American folk-melodism and in that particular direction which it took in the hands of the eighteenth century fuguing-song makers. Compare for melodic similarities ‘Geordie’, JFSS, iii., 191. White Spirituals tells more about Mr. Denson who died in 1936.