Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!

Elizabeth, soon to be the mother of John the Baptist, concluded her greeting to her cousin Mary with the words ‘How happy is she who has had faith that the Lord’s promise would be fulfilled!’ The text of Luke 1:46 in the 1961 New English Bible continues, ‘And Mary said: “Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord, rejoice, my spirit, in God my saviour …��?’ These were the words which particularly struck Timothy Dudley-Smith as he looked through his review copy of the new translation, in bed one evening at his Blackheath home in May of that year. He was then Asst Secretary of the Church Pastoral Aid Society. ‘I jotted down a series of verses’, he wrote later, beginning with that version of Mary’s words (or Magnificat); ‘I saw in it the first line of a poem, and speedily wrote the rest’. He sent it to Scripture Union for the forthcoming Hymns of Faith ‘but they did not want it.’ The editors of the Anglican Hymn Book also being compiled then said they would like to use it as a hymn, and so it appeared in the 1965 AHB to William Llewellyn’s tune TIDINGS. Meanwhile the author was assisting Michael Baughen (editor) in plans for what became Youth Praise, and in 1966 it was re-launched with MAB’s tune, later named either TELL OUT, MY SOUL, or GO FORTH as it was also set to the words of 616. It was soon established as a favourite; but when the A&M supplement 100 Hymns for Today set it to WOODLANDS (named in AHB as a 3rd option after Martin Shaw’s JULIUS), it took off into new areas.

The hymn was soon being requested for all kinds of occasions and appearing in a number of books which by 1984 had exceeded 50 and by 2004, a further 100. It has been widely praised as both a genuinely contemporary hymn, and one which led the way into the flowering of new writing which has continued for over 4 decades. Thus Sir John Betjeman called it in 1976 ‘one of the very few new hymns really to establish themselves in recent years’; while Prof J Watson says in The English Hymn (1997, p28): ‘I suspect that in that [first] line Dudley-Smith provided the detonator for what has been called the ‘hymn explosion’ of the last forty years … It is possible … that if he had not realised the strength of these words as a hymn line, a pentameter rich with the pauses and rhythms of ordinary speech, and yet also distinctive in its diction (“Tell out��? suggests a bell), shape and command, others would not have been inspired to write modern hymns.’ And on p345, JRW adds that by writing it, TDS ‘showed that a new hymn could be written that would be an acceptable addition to every hymnbook, and in so doing he helped to create a microclimate for modern hymnwriting.’ It has proved more enduring than the now superseded (and generally unpoetic) NEB translation which gave it birth; although it appears in many different sections of thematically-planned hymn-books, the revolutionary message of Mary which it expresses still seems very far from being realised. For a different and closer metrical approach to her song, 185.

The now universal tune WOODLANDS was composed in 1916 by Walter Greatorex for H Montagu Butler’s Lift up your hearts, with which it appeared in the 1919 Public School Hymn Book. It was also widely set to Basil Matthews’ Far round the world thy children sing their song. The composer was Director of Music from 1911 onwards at Gresham School, Holt, Norfolk, one of whose houses is ‘Woodlands’. The same name had been given earlier to a tune by James Lord of Bacup, Lancs, much played by the local ‘Prize Band’.

b Manchester 1926. Tonbridge School, Kent, Pembroke Coll Camb, and Ridley Hall Camb; ordained (CofE) 1950. After ministry at Northumberland Heath (nr Erith, Kent) and Bermondsey (SE London) he worked with the Evangelical Alliance, editing Crusade magazine before moving to the Church Pastoral Aid Society, becoming Gen Sec in 1965. Subsequently he became Archdeacon of Norwich (73–81), then suffragan Bp of Thetford until his retirement to Ford, nr Salisbury, in 1992. A writer of verse (including a mastery of the comic sort) from his youth, he is seen by Prof J R Watson (in The English Hymn, 1997) as igniting the late 20th cent ‘hymn explosion’ with his 1961 Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord, one of the hymns from that period in the widest use. He is the author of over 250 hymn texts in a similar number of hymnals worldwide, first collected in Lift Every Heart (1984), most recently in A House of Praise ( 2003). The latest of 4 smaller supplements, A Door for the Word, appeared in 2006, and 2 smaller booklets of his texts with accompanying music were published in 2001 and 2006: respectively Beneath a Travelling Star and A Calendar of Praise.

For many years the Bible commentator Derek Kidner was a mentor for most of TDS’s early drafts. While some were begun or completed at home, on trains or elsewhere, several were the fruit of family holidays on the Cornish coast, as a pre-breakfast employment (and delight) overlooking the beach near The Lizard. As reviewers have often observed, his texts are notable for their varied metres, disciplined rhyming, and biblical content; the theme of redemption through the cross and the shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ is a theme encountered consistently, naturally and with variety; so is the fact that ‘the Lord is risen’. Without plagiarising, the hymns deliberately draw on a wide range of earlier poets and other authors for suggested ideas, as the attached notes fully illustrate. 37 items are included in Sing Glory (1999); 18 are in the N American Worship and Rejoice (2001), 9 in the 2005 edn of A Panorama of Christian Hymnody and 33 in the new Anglo- Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise (new edn, 2006). His other books include A Flame of Love: A personal choice of Charles Wesley’s verse ( 1987), Praying with the English Hymn-writers (1989), and a 2 vol biography (the first) of John R W Stott (1999, 2001). He has served on editorial groups for Psalm Praise (1973) and Common Praise (2000), and has addressed and been honoured by both the N American and British Hymn Societies, respectively as Fellow and Hon Vice-President. In 2003 he was awarded the OBE ‘for services to hymnody’. Hymn festivals in Tunbridge Wells and Salisbury, together with an extended BBC ‘Sunday Half Hour’ on New Year’s Eve, marked his 80th birthday at the end of 2006, following the publication of a seasonallyarranged selection of 30 texts in A Calendar of Praise (with music, mostly traditional). In an opening address to the Hymn Soc’s Guildford conference in its 70th year (also 2006), TDS spoke of his (and our) ups and downs as ‘Snakes and Ladders’, concluding with that greatest of ‘ladders’ from Gen 28, referred to in Elizabeth’s Clephane’s text (699) which has meant everything to him: ‘so seems my Saviour’s cross to me/ a ladder up to heaven’. Nos.10, 20, 25, 26, 32, 34, 41, 56, 60, 63, 65, 69B, 72, 73, 91B, 115, 119H, 134, 141, 218, 238, 320, 327, 351, 360, 389, 402, 405, 410, 413, 436, 459, 466, 488, 497, 516, 531, 553, 558, 623, 628, 659, 688, 697, 746, 750, 784, 823, 924, 925, 939, 949, 951, 1001, 1002, 1005, 1006, 1009, 1019, 1020, 1025, 1042, 1077, 1136, 1166, 1174, 1214.