No. 60 Green Fields, Soh 71
Hexatonic, mode 3 b (I II III IV V VI —)
How tedious and tasteless the hours,
When Jesus no longer I see;
Sweet prospects, sweet birds and sweet flow’rs
Have all lost their sweetness to me.
The midsummer sun shines but dim,
The fields strive in vain to look gay;
But when I am happy in him,
December’s as pleasant as May.
His name yields the richest perfume,
And sweeter than music his voice;
His presence disperses my gloom,
And makes all within me rejoice.
I should, were he always thus nigh,
Have nothing to wish or to fear;
No mortal so happy as I,
My summer would last all the year.
Content with beholding his face,
My all to his pleasure resigned,
No changes of seasons or place,
Would make any change in my mind.
While blessed with a sense of his love,
A palace a toy would appear;
And prisons would palaces prove,
If Jesus would dwell with me there.
The tune is to be found in S. Baring-Gould’s Songs of the West, No. 100, as recorded before 1890 from the singing of an old man in Lamerton, England. We are informed by the editor of the collection that the song, ‘Both Sexes Give Ear to My Fancy’ which used this tune, had been very popular with aged people residing in the North of England, but that it was then “long out of print and handed down traditionally”. The earliest form of the tune seems to have been ‘Es nehme zehn-tausend Ducaten’ in Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet (Cf. Bach-Gesellschaft, Vol. 29, p. 195). The earliest printed form of the Bach tune in England, according to Baring-Gould, was in The Tragedy of Tragedies, or Tom Thumb, 1734, as the setting of the song ‘In Hurry Posthaste for a License’. The earliest occurrence of the tune with the ‘Both Sexes’ text was in The Lady’s Evening Book of Pleasure, about 1740. The air is also found in Vocal Music, or the Songster’s Companion, second edition, 1782, to the song entitled ‘Farewell, Ye Green Fields and Sweet Groves’. This was probably the song whose tune was taken over bodily and whose words were parodied to make the above song ‘Green Fields’. The author of the parody text was sometimes given in the fasola books as John Newton. The incidence of the song in southern song books of the first half of the nineteenth century (MOH 52, GCM 144, UH 112, KNH 80, OSH 127, HH 345, SOC 30, CM 24, HOC 16, TZ 237, SKH 18, PB 312, GOS 303, etc.) indicates its one-time wide popularity also on this continent.