Daw, Carl Pickens (jr)

Author

b Louisville, Kentucky 1944. Rice Univ, Univ of Virginia, Univ of the South. From a Baptist background, he became an Anglican and was ordained to ministry with the Episcopal Ch of the USA, serving churches in Virginia and Connecticut and the Community of Celebration, Aliquippa, Penns, also teaching English. He began hymnwriting in 1980 while consultant for The Hymnal 1982. His collected texts are found in A Year of Grace (1990), To Sing God’s Praise (metrical canticles, 1992) and New Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1996). Has written widely on hymnody, and shared work on A Hymntune Psalter (1998–9) From 1996 to 2009 he was Executive Director of the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada—a job entailing much administration, editing the periodical leaflet The Stanza, and teaching the hymnology course at the Boston Univ Sch of Theology. As writers, he and Thos Troeger (qv) are ‘the two most widely published hymnists from the United States’—Paul A Richardson, who includes 9 of his texts and a paraphrase in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody. He notes Daw’s ‘ability to perceive deeper meaning in biblical stories, more or less familiar’, adding that ‘both [authors] have written with the intent to make the church’s song more biblical’ and that Daw ‘is particularly effective when contemplating the God beyond human conception.’ CPD has conducted many hymn festivals and similar events in N America; he has 6 texts in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), 7 in The Book of Praise (Presbyterian Church of Canada, 1997), 16 in Worship and Rejoice (2001), 21 in the United Church of Canada’s Common Praise (1998), 3 in the UK book of the same title (2000), and 22 in the new edn of the Anglo-Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (2006). Nos.19B, 530.