No. 7 Liverpool or Solemn Address to Young People, Osh 37
Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)
Young people all attention give,
And hear what I shall say;
I wish your souls with Christ to live
In everlasting day.
Remember you are hastening on
To death’s dark gloomy shade;
Your joys on earth will soon be gone,
Your flesh in dust be laid.
Death’s iron gate you must pass through,
Ere long, my dear young friends;
With whom then do you think to go,
With saints or fiery fiends?
Pray meditate before too late,
While in a gospel land;
Behold! King Jesus at the gate
Most lovingly doth stand.
Young men, how can you turn face
From such a glorious friend;
Will you pursue your dang’rous ways?
O don’t you fear the end?
Will you pursue that dang’rous road
Which leads to death and hell?
Will you refuse all peace with God,
With devils for to dwell?
Young women too, what will you do,
If out of Christ you die?
From all God’s people you must go,
To weep, lament and cry.
Where you the least relief can’t find,
To mitigate your pain;
Your good things all be left behind,
Your souls in death remain.
Young people all, I pray then view
The fountain open’d wide;
The spring of life open’d for sin,
Which flow’d from Jesus’ side.
There you may drink in endless joy,
And reign with Christ, your king,
In his glad notes your souls employ,
And hallelujahs sing.
The earliest appearance of the text is in Mercer’s Cluster, a collection of rurally used hymns (not tunes) by Jesse Mercer, benefactor of Mercer University, who lived in Powellton, Georgia, in the 1820’s. The editor of the Sacred Harp attributes the tune to M. C. H. Davis, a southern rural. The song is found also UH 27, HH 83, HOC 113, WP 36, SOC 76, SOH I and CHH 58. The tune is a member of the ‘Lord Lovel’ family mentioned in the introduction, p. 14, and is closely related to ‘Mermaid’, Sharp, i., 291, and to ‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’, SMM No. 3, and its seventeenth-century country-dance form ‘The Bonny Bonny Broome’, Playford’s The English Dancing Master, p. 74. For a list of other members of the ‘Lord Lovel’ tune family see ‘Dulcimer’ in this collection.