Officially “Hymned”

You can now say that I am officially “Hymned” thanks to Bart Millard’s solo release “Hymned”. As one who considers himself to be a Progressive Traditionalist when it comes to Southern Gospel Music (If you want to put it in political terms, I’m a Democrat when it comes to my music! LOL!), I absolutely love “Hymned”.

From the cool piano intro on “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” to the haunting dobro stains of “The Old Rugged Cross”, this is one of the best hymn recordings to come out in a long time. Hymn recordings are always hard to do. So many of them are dry and boring and they are treated like second-rate recordings; when these tried and true songs of the faith should be treated with respect and recorded as such. In my opinion, one of the best hymns recordings was the one Howard & Vestal Goodman did back in 1983 called “Take us Back” which has what I think is probably the greatest vocal and musical performance of “Blessed Assurance” ever done, as Vestal literally blows it out of the water. But this new (well, it’s not that new anymore) hymns recording by Millard really rocks. It proved a fact I figured out a long time ago, these old hymns still work.

While most SG artists are respectful towards hymns, as I said earlier, they still tend to be very dry and quite boring. I find for my own personal tastes, that most CCM artists tend to over produce and re-arrange hymns in such a way that they can almost be musically offensive. While there are some off the wall arrangements on a couple of tunes on “Hymned”, I actually love them all. I love what Millard did with “In the Sweet By & By” as a tribute to his Mawmaw. My little 5-year-old loves that song and we sing it to each other almost every other day. The arrangement for “My Jesus I Love Thee/’Tis So Sweet” is absolutely mesmerizing. Also, one of the highlights for me was hearing Millard along with Russ Taff belt out the lyrics to “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”. The remainder of the song list on this musically innovative recording include “Pass me Not”, “Just a Little Talk with Jesus”, “Softly and Tenderly”, “Sweetest Name I Know” and “There is Power in the Blood”.

It’s very obvious that these tunes hold a special place in Millard’s life and are the foundation of who he is spiritually. This recording will no doubt introduce a vast generation of Praise & Worshipers to the foundations of our faith and our music that is found in these great hymns. And here we all thought that hymns were a thing of the past. Thank you Bart, for bringing some of these great songs back to center stage.