Okay, new tack. I'm going to try to get myself a little bit organized here. (I can't say that with a straight face. LOL)
I'm going to go through some of the hymnals in the order in which the songs appear in each hymnal. There may be some repetition of songs I've posted before, but I will most of the time create a new post rather than just repeat a previous one verbatim.
There are a few hymnals that represent specific time periods in my life. My childhood years were spent in the Watervliet Church of Christ, a very small congregation made up of my grandparents and a few other folks who had migrated to Michigan from down South during or after the Depression. We had a few different hymnals during those years, all paperback, and all with a mixture of traditional hymns and Southern gospel songs. And all with shaped-notes.
So I'm going to start going through one of the paperback songbooks we used at Watervliet when I was growing up. I probably won't use all the songs, just the ones I most associate with the years I went to that church.
* * *
Here is some information my mother wrote in her memoirs about the Church of Christ in the place where I grew up:
Wathada’s memories -
early days of the Church of Christ in southwestern Michigan:
When my grandparents, Ulysses “Ulys” and Annie Hicks, first
moved to Bridgman, in Berrien County, Michigan in May 1942, they found there
wasn’t a Church of Christ in all of southwestern Michigan. They found an ad in
the newspaper asking for anyone who was interested in starting a congregation
of the Church of Christ. Ulys answered the ad, and he and four or five other
men and their families started the Church of Christ in southwestern Michigan. The
ones I can think of besides Ulys are Wayne Lanham, Albert Bradshaw, Ervil
Hancock, and Harley Story. They started meeting upstairs in the YMCA building
in downtown Benton Harbor.
The congregation was only those few families, but we had
Sunday school classes because they all had children. At that time Benton Harbor
was a beautiful little city and a very good place to live and grow up. The congregation grew rapidly and sometime
before 1946, they had purchased a building with a nice parking lot on Milton
Street in Benton Harbor. That’s the
church where I grew up. The building was
filled every Sunday. We had a very good
Sunday school and good teachers. When I was a teenager, we had a big class. We
loved being together and though we didn’t have such things as “youth ministers”
in those days, my teenage class was together several evenings a week - more
than just Sunday and Wednesday nights. There was one summer when we were
together every evening of the week with planned activities, which we planned
ourselves with our parents’ approval.
Our parents were very supportive and allowed us to meet in our homes, and they
provided refreshments.
I remember that most of us loved to sing and one of the
activities that we scheduled was one evening a week to get together and
sing. Sometimes one of our parents would
invite our whole class to their home after church for Sunday dinner, and we
would spend the afternoon together, then go back to church that night together
in a caravan of cars. We were with our church family the entire day almost
every Sunday. Our parents also socialized
that way. They nearly always invited another family or two home for Sunday
dinner after church, or some other family invited them. It was a very good
church. We had good elders then - Ulys
was one of the elders.
Ulys was a very good singer, so he led singing most of the
time. He taught a course every once in a while on reading and singing by shaped
notes. He was also a very good
preacher. He never “preached at” us, but
he was a teacher, and he was so good at that.
Everyone loved to hear him preach. He used charts pretty often when he
preached, so he could lead the congregation visually through his sermon.
For a while after the church moved to Milton Street, several
of the men took turns preaching, but in time they hired a full time
preacher. The church grew and sometimes
we had to set up folding chairs at the ends of the rows of pews to make room
for everybody. In 1952, there were so many people coming to church from Coloma,
Watervliet, Hartford and that whole area, that they decided they needed to have
a congregation in that vicinity. So with the blessings of the Benton Harbor
congregation, we started having church in Watervliet. Ulys was retired and he agreed to preach for
the Watervliet congregation for one year, with no salary. The congregation rented an apartment in Watervliet
for Ulys and Annie to live in during that year.
Other families besides ours who were there and helped get the Watervliet
congregation started were Harmon and Myrle Parker, Chester “Chet” and Regina
Linville, Arlie and Marie Lynch, Reggie and Lucille Moore, Herman and Dessie
Bradford, Cecil and Opal Selvidge,
Albert and Gertie Brumley, Pauline Hembree Yingling. I’m sure there were others that I can’t think
of right now.
The new congregation met for a while upstairs over Roy’s Bar
on Main Street in Watervliet. It wasn’t
very long before the congregation bought a nice little church building on the
corner of North Watervliet Road and Hagar Shore Road. The men mortgaged their homes to pay for the
building. It was a good little congregation and did well. But through the years, as the members of the
congregation grew old, some died, some
members moved to other states because they needed to be near their children in
their old age -- there weren’t any young
people to take their places in the church.
So there came a time after a lot of good years, when the last of the original members, and the few who were
left of the congregation decided there was nothing to do but to end the
congregation and sell the building. It
was sad, but necessary. It had been a
really good congregation, with wonderful people. They loved each other as we are supposed
to. They were family.
