When people think of Mormons, one of the few things they often know is that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abstain from alcoholic drinks. I’ve known a few people who seem to think that you can’t have fun without a little help from the bottle, and for them the idea of an alcohol-free Mormon party sounds really boring. And depending on what they look for in a party, perhaps they are right. Bill Cosby has a few words for those in that camp.
After Thanksgiving, my uncle, cousin, brother-in-law, brother, and various other Wilson friends and family came over to my parents home for a spontaneous jam session. We had a blast laughing and dancing and suggesting new songs. So I wanted to share our Good Ol’ Clean Mormon Family Fun with the rest of you. Here they are with a spontaneous, improvised rendition of Sing Sing Sing (with a swing):
The past Sunday, our Bishopric decided that instead of following the Sacrament ceremony with prepared talks by three or four members of the congregation, or with a testimony meeting like we normally do, they would try something new: A Hymn Testimony Meeting.
The Bishop’s Councilor read the First Presidency’s preface to the LDS Hymnal:
Music in Our Church Meetings
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Inspirational music is an essential part of our church meetings. The hymns invite the Spirit of the Lord, create a feeling of reverence, unify us as members, and provide a way for us to offer praises to the Lord.
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Some of the greatest sermons are preached by the singing of hymns. Hymns move us to repentance and good works, build testimony and faith, comfort the weary, console the mourning, and inspire us to endure to the end.
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We hope to see an increase of hymn singing in our congregations. We encourage all members, whether musically inclined or not, to join with us in singing the hymns. We hope leaders, teachers, and members who are called on to speak will turn often to the hymnbook to find sermons presented powerfully and beautifully in verse.
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Latter-day Saints have a long tradition of choir singing. Every ward and branch in the Church should have a choir that performs regularly. We encourage choirs to use the hymnbook as their basic resource.
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Music in Our Homes
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Music has boundless powers for moving families toward greater spirituality and devotion to the gospel. Latter-day Saints should fill their homes with the sound of worthy music.
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Ours is a hymnbook for the home as well as for the meetinghouse. We hope the hymnbook will take a prominent place among the scriptures and other religious books in our homes. The hymns can bring families a spirit of beauty and peace and can inspire love and unity among family members.
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Teach your children to love the hymns. Sing them on the Sabbath, in home evening, during scripture study, at prayer time. Sing as you work, as you play, and as you travel together. Sing hymns as lullabies to build faith and testimony in your young ones.
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Music in Our Personal Lives
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In addition to blessing us as Church and family members, the hymns can greatly benefit us as individuals. Hymns can lift our spirits, give us courage, and move us to righteous action. They can fill our souls with heavenly thoughts and bring us a spirit of peace.
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Hymns can also help us withstand the temptations of the adversary. We encourage you to memorize your favorite hymns and study the scriptures that relate to them. Then, if unworthy thoughts enter your mind, sing a hymn to yourself, crowding out the evil with the good.
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Brothers and sisters, let us use the hymns to invite the Spirit of the Lord into our congregations, our homes, and our personal lives. Let us memorize and ponder them, recite and sing them, and partake of their spiritual nourishment. Know that the song of the righteous is a prayer unto our Father in Heaven, “and it shall be answered with a blessing upon [your] heads.”
He then explained that we, as members of the congregation, were invited to come forward to the pulpit, when prompted by the Holy Spirit, and direct the congregation to a favorite hymn in the hymnal and share how that hymn has influenced our testimonies of the Savior and the Restoration of His Church. We were encouraged to read one stanza of the hymn aloud and then the congregation would sing one or two of the other verses. To allow enough time for people to share, no more than two verses would be allowed.
The meeting that followed was wonderfully inspirational. Members got up and told short experiences that made their specific hymn of choice special to them and shared their feelings of worship and devotion to the Lord. We must have sung almost 2 dozen hymns during the course of the remainder of the meeting.
One sister in particular nearly brought me to tears. She and her husband have an adult son who suffers from fairly serious Autism who attends with them every week. She got up and said that she would like to stand proxy for her son because he cannot speak for himself. She described how much he loves the hymns of the church. She then read from the words of the second verse of hymn #227, There is Sunshine In My Soul Today (download MP3):
There is music in my soul today, a carol to my King,
and Jesus listening can hear the songs I cannot sing.
Oh there’s sunshine, blessed sunshine,
when the peaceful, happy moments roll.
When Jesus shows his smiling face,
there is sunshine in the soul.
We all raised our voices to sing, and when we reached the words ”…Jesus listening can hear, the songs I cannot sing,” I nearly had to stop singing because of the emotions I felt as I watched our Autistic brother, rocking back and forth to the music as he sat with his family in the pew.
Often our meetings focus on doctrine, personal experiences, and teaching. This was a meeting where worship ruled. And it was a blessing.
There really was sunshine in our souls last Sunday. I hope we do hymn testimony meetings regularly.
I came across this brilliant video on YouTube over the weekend.
Q: What if the Beatles covered the classic Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven”?
A: The Beatnix
When people talk about ADD they usually are talking about an inability to focus. Attention disorders are prevalent in my family and, superficially, you might attribute a great deal of my behavior to this standard concept of ADD. In reality, however, my disability is exactly the opposite. I struggle with an Attention Over-Focus Disorder. I become over focused on a project, a task, or an idea, to the exclusion of perspective. It is very difficult for me to transfer my attention from one thing to another and as a result I often neglect important tasks, spend to much time on minutia, and resist change.
Over-focus is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, when my focus does shift to something that needs to be done, I am capable of long periods of sustained focus with a great deal of attention to detail and I get a lot accomplished. On the other, if my focus does somehow turn to something else before I have completed that upon which I was previously focused, it may be a long time before I manage to get back to it. And when I am over-focused I overreact negatively to even minor interruptions, tend to give undue weight to perceived slights or criticisms, unnecessarily go over the same idea repeatedly in my head, over-focus on the negative in general, and I don’t get anything else done, no matter how important it is.
Controlling this behavior involves influencing the levels of Dopamine and Serotonin in my brain. It is a tricky balance to strike because I need to become unfocused enough to not be over-focused, but still focussed enough to be productive. Often the effort results in an unhappy choice: I can be a pleasant, happy person and make my wife and children happy to be around me and be completely unproductive, or I can be highly productive and a miserable excuse for a husband and father. We have been praying that Heavenly Father would reveal to us a better solution to my disability.
Recently I have taken up running or jogging in the mornings as a way of trying to strike the balance. It appears to be helping.
While I am not particularly musical, I have always been fortunate to be in the company of wonderfully musical people. In addition to my own immediate family, growing up I was close friends with the second generation of The Osmond Brothers. The 5 Browns are my first cousins.
Also among my closest friends is the hyper-talented Lowe Family. This past September, we traveled to Branson Missouri where they have been performing for some years now. They treated us like royalty and we had a great time.
The Lowe Family has self-produced a music video for their original song “We Will Go On,” written by my friend Doug Lowe.
Earlier this year they performed with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir during the broadcast of ‘Music and the Spoken Word.”
My favorite is their arrangement with the choir of “Hurry Home” by Jon Anderson (vocalist of the progressive rock band “Yes”):
Go watch the higher quality version of the music video as well as selections from the video of their performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and highlights from their live show on their website at:
Just wanted to remind you all about tonight’s Skook Reunion Concert and Fund raiser for LDS Humanitarian Services. Get on your dancing shoes and bring your kids.
Click her for Concert details.
And just to get you in the mood, here is a video mashup of Skook’s song “Popularity” with the incomparable Jerry Lewis dancing from a scene of the 1963 version of The Nutty Professor:
See you there!
What: A Variety of Family-Friendly Live Music
When: Friday July 6th 5:30pm – 9:30pm
Where: Tahitian Noni Auditorium 333 River Park Dr, Provo, Utah, Utah 84604 (map)
If you live in Utah or will be visiting during the week of Independence Day, bring your family over to the Tahitian Noni Auditorium in north Provo, near Provo Canyon, on July 6th for an evening of family-friendly music and dancing with the former members of the local Ska Band Skook. The concert is free, but they will be accepting voluntary donations for LDS Humanitarian Services.
Brothers Ben and Joe Wilson formed Skook about 10 years ago in Cache Valley as a ska-influenced punk trio. Soon thereafter they moved to Utah Valley where they added some excellent horn players and their sound evolved into their own flavor of ska. From the beginning Skook was decidedly anti-popularity, and the theme is reflected in their lyrics. From the sarcasm of “I wanna be a suave mac-daddy man” to the still popular anthem “I shop at D. I.,” Skook was cool because they rejected what was “cool.”
Listen to a 5 minute sample mp3 of excerpts from nine Skook songs
Some of you know that I have a fascination with Vaudeville and the roots of modern entertainment. We often forget that many of those who first established the conventions of movies, television, and popular music performance were first vaudevillians. I am also a big fan of swing music, both early and the neo-swing revival of the 90s. I have sometimes daydreamed about opening a modern vaudeville theatre.
The artists of that era were truly amazing performers and their energy and talent is often missing from our modern entertainment industry.
Watch the amazing video above, from the film “Stormy Weather.” It showcases the extraordinary talents of some of my favorite performers from that bygone time: the fantastic Cab Calloway and the stupendous Nicholas Brothers . Fred Astaire said this sequence was the finest piece of tap dancing ever filmed.
My uncle, Brent Brown, who owns several car dealerships throughout Utah, is an amazing guitarist. I always enjoyed gawking at his guitar signed by Van Halen when we would visit him as kids. Every once in a while he would pull out his own guitar and play a song or two, but I never remember getting the chance to hear him play with a full band.
So I was pleasantly surprised when I went to check out a news story on Governor Huntsman playing rock music in the basement of the governor’s mansion and found my uncle Brent wailing on his guitar and singing with the governor accompanying on piano.
Before I get into this subject, I readily recognize that I make grammar mistakes all the time. In fact I am notorious for bad spelling. Grammar mistakes in common conversation or blog posts or blog comments don’t bother me much. And even though I did major in English in college, I have never approved of those who feel the constant need to correct the grammar of others, especially when the meaning of their words is perfectly clear even with the incorrect grammar.
However, I am annoyed under certain circumstances by obvious grammar mistakes. Three recent bad grammar sightings that annoyed me:
Some of you may have seen independent film New York Doll1 , about Arthur “Killer” Kane2 who was the bassist for the short lived but influential 70s glam-rock, proto-punk band The New York Dolls3 . Kane eventually joined the LDS Church. I enjoyed the film quite a lot. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out on video.
Well, The New York Dolls, without Kane who passed away in 2004, have released a new song and music video: Dance Like a Monkey.
