This is the day, this is the day

Concluding the section of hymns specifically for the Lord’s Day (though 2 others are suggested and many more available) is an altogether different composition which gained much popularity since its first appearance. Like many before him, Les Garrett used the words of Psalm 118:24, this time confining himself to that single text. It was written at Brisbane in 1967 during a ‘hard time, really going through the valley’; it appeared in Britain in the 1974 Sound of Living Waters, and is now included in several mainstream hymnals. In SLW and elsewhere, stz 2 begins ‘This is the day … when he rose again’ and 3, ‘… when the Spirit came’. They add both variety and NT content for the almost inevitable repeats, in a song where every phrase is sung up to 5 times already. There are two distinct traditions in print for the rendering of the music for which the author wrote his text. Praise! adopts Roger Mayor’s more recent arrangement of the original tune, while Christopher Norton’s version in Songs from the Psalms (1990) represents that in which the lines 1 and 3 begin on the same note (the tonic). The 1999 Companion to Rejoice and Sing goes further: ‘Unfortunately, in its short life the piece has spawned countless variants’. Originally described as a ‘Fiji Island Folk Melody’, it is now claimed by the author as his own composition.

b Mamatmata, New Zealand 1943 or 1944. Trained at the Word of Faith Bible Sch before pastoring the Christian family Centre at Maddington, W Australia. He became known for his strong advocacy of the AV (‘King James’) Bible, on which he has spoken on N American tours of mainly Baptist churches, and for the one ‘Scripture song’ included here. With variations, this has spread round the world from its beginnings in Brisbane in 1967. In the UK it featured in Sound of Living Waters, 1974. He has written other song collections, and books on Bible translation etc. No.234