The Song Is Wrong

Music shapes and reflects most of my life. On great days, when the sun is shining and it’s a warm spring day, you’ll hear me singing “What a day for a daydream….” (For those of you born after 1980, that was a song by The Lovin’ Spoonful.) On hard days, sad days, you’ll hear me singing “Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain…” (Again for you folks still in the first half of life, that was a song by The Cascades. A later version was a hit by Dan Fogelberg.)

I grew up listening to hymns on Sunday morning TV as we got ready to go to church and sing some of the same hymns. The Blue Ridge Quartet, with the great bass singer J. Elmo Fagg (and we all loved to say his name) was located in Spartanburg, and showed up on WSPA every Sunday morning, starting the day with “This is my story, this is my song…”

As a teen I was into folk and rock music, but somewhere in my soul, there was a deep place for Appalachian music. And the song/hymn Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley, a conflation of Appalachian folk and American Negro Spiritual lives in there. It has an almost mournful tune, and the words speak of having to face the trials and struggles of life alone.

Jesus walked this lonesome valley;
he had to walk it by himself.
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him;
he had to walk it by himself.

A later verse personalizes it.

You got to  walk this lonesome valley;
you got to walk it by yourself.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for you;
you have to walk it by yourself.

It is the perfect American tune, with American lyrics, expressing American values. Life is a struggle and we have to face it individually. Nobody else can do it for us.

There’s enough truth in here to make it work. We face things that no one else faces. Our struggles are ours, and each one is different from the other. A popular saying going around right now says, “Be kind to everyone you meet. They have some struggle going on that you do not know about.”

But, while we must walk this lonesome valley, we do not have to walk it by ourselves. We are not meant to walk it alone. Even Jesus did not do that. On the darkest night of his life, as he faced his impending execution at the hands of the state, Jesus asked his three closest friends to stay with him as he prayed. They kept falling asleep as he did so (it had already been a long day and night for all of them), and he was disappointed and hurt because they couldn’t be with him as he struggled with what was about to come. He did not want to be alone. A while later, after being beaten and tortured by the state, he was made to carry his cross. But he couldn’t do that alone. He needed the help of someone else, Simon of Cyrene, to carry it for him. And from the cross, he looked for his friends. He found his mother, John, his aunt, and a couple of other Marys. (John 19:25)

Jesus wanted and needed someone to be with him. So do we. Even the idea of God as a Trinity tells us that we are not made to go through this life alone. The song is wrong.

I’ll probably still sing it from time to time. It is in one of the United Methodist songbooks, The Faith We Sing. I love the tune, and even the sentiment.

But I don’t want to walk this valley alone.