Giving thanks and credit where it's due

Bounty

Thanksgiving morning, about 25 years ago, I attended the traditional service, with my dad, in the historic church, where George Washington had once been a vestryman and where my children grew up and occasionally played hide and seek amongst the revolutionary gravestones. Dad was then about the age I am now and an enthusiastic but tone-deaf singer. We’d left Mother at home with the turkey and child-watching duties.

I was so happy to escape some of the food preparation (and admittedly the overstimulated young boys) and, holding the hymnal with Dad, I sang the traditional Thanksgiving hymn, "We Gather Together." I had been singing that song all my life, and knew the words by heart. When we got to the line, "the wicked oppressing now cease ..." I glanced at the hymnal and, with shock in my voice, I whispered, “Dad, the hymnal is wrong."  

Dinner before

Dinner after

For the entirety of my growing up I'd thought that the words were "the wicked oppressing now cease from this dressing." In my childish mind, we were singing the evil out of the dressing so we could safely eat our Thanksgiving dinner. I worried, as a young child, about the dressing (huge mounds of wonderfulness that included cornbread and was cooked in a large cast iron skillet) being evil and what would happen if the wicked hadn't been eliminated from it and I ate it.

Dad was so filled with the spirit of the day and the warmth of the environment, as well as being a tad hard of hearing, that he didn’t hear me (or chose to ignore me). On the walk home, I told him my discovery. The actual words, “now cease from distressing,” were easily confused by a child in the South where “this dressing” and “distressing” sound very much the same. We laughed at my mistake.

This was not the first time I had a mix-up regarding church hymns. When I was a teenager, I loved all folk music – especially Cat Stevens. “Morning Has Broken” was one of my favorites and I naturally assumed he wrote the words and the music.

One Sunday in the early 1970’s, this time in the Presbyterian church in the small Florida town where I grew up, I turned the pages of my hymnal to the next song and saw, “Morning Has Broken.” When the organist began playing Cat Stevens’s melody, I whispered, “Dad, they took this song from Cat Stevens!” As a knowing teenager nearing the end of high school, I thought that was pretty cool that stodgy Presbyterians were using Cat’s material. Dad whispered something back like, “we can talk about the cat later.”

I looked more closely at the page and saw that Eleanor Farjeon wrote the song in 1931, obviously inspired by the Bible (Genesis, for example). Later I found that the tune is a traditional Scottish Gaelic one. I never mentioned it to Dad again for fear he would have thought me a dolt or wanted to discuss our aging cat.

Enjoy the gatherings

The holiday season brings us wonderful music, opportunities for gatherings with friends and family, and so much joy. As with most things, it’s important to pay attention to the words, not make assumptions, and give credit to writers and the works that inspire them.

This blog originally appeared as an article in the Fernandina Beach News-Leader on November 26, 2025