[1] One More Step Along The World I Go

‘And it’s from the old I travel to the new,
Keep me travelling along with you’

Well it seems I’ve already failed my New Year’s Resolution. It’s been a bit over a week since my previous post. I haven’t attempted to learn more Welsh, I haven’t quite finished my essay yet, and currently my housemate’s mum is doing our washing-up.

I’m also not really starting as I mean to go on with this post, in that this is definitely a Christian lyric from a Christian piece of music. I think though that it’s appropriate for the time of year, and although the song sounds a bit naff and simple, it’s got a clever musical kick to it. More on that later.

I’m looking at the version in Songs of Fellowship vol. 3 (yes, there are three… Scratch that, just googled it, there are four plus a Christmas one), and it’s number 1483. The titular first line is a bit weird; why choose words which don’t work together? If we rearrange the phrase into an order you’d actually say (if you’re not Yoda) it’d be ‘I go one more step along the world’, which isn’t much better. You don’t ‘go’ a ‘step’ any more than you go ‘along’ the ‘world’. Technically, you take a step, and you go round or through the world. The word order and verb ‘go’ are there because it makes it easier to rhyme, nothing more. It’s the ‘along’ thing that really gets me; you just don’t say that. To try and come to peace with this line, we could look at it compared with the chorus given above.

Here we are given a different path to travel; not one through the world, but one from ‘the old’ to ‘the new’. This gives us two separate journeys, which this song connects by using the word ‘along’, even though it doesn’t really work. The resonance between the first line and the last line ties everything in, saying that in all journeys, metaphorical and physical, we should be side by side with whoever ‘you’ refers to (God? The priest? The organist? The congregation? All of the above?).

The clever musical kick I mentioned earlier occurs in the chorus. At least in the version I’m looking at, the vast majority of the song is swung, which means it’s got a bouncy, jolly feel. When it was written in the 70s, this was to make the song more accessible to the hip youngsters of the day, playing their transistor radios and wearing flares. The clever bit is that the words ‘And it’s from the old I travel to the’ are written out without swing, in the style of a traditional hymn. On the word ‘new’, the music regains its trendy plugged-in switched-on swing, and that’s no lie, brother.

Perhaps this was a conscious decision, or perhaps the writer just associated the word ‘old’ with the old-style of hymn, but it tells us something quite interesting about how we do church. The lyrics are looking forwards to a better future, they are wholeheartedly embracing change, and the music impishly implies that this applies to church music. It’s implying that the new mode is better.

I’m aware that there’ll be people reading this who are all-out in favour of travelling to the new, i.e. doing church in a new way, unshackling ourselves from dusty tradition. Pruning the branches that don’t bear fruit, as it were. There’ll be people too who argue that we must retain tradition, in order to remain rooted in the origins of the faith. I would argue that we should be striving towards creative tension between these two positions, so that we can ‘travel to the new’ whilst always ‘travelling’ along’ with everybody else.

At this point in the new year, let’s not just look forwards to where we can go and what we can be, in life, faith or anything else. Let’s find a balance between doing that and looking back to where we went and what we were. For where we are and where we hoped we’d be; thanks be to God!