You're Singing "Praise to the Man" Wrong

Good news!

After 33 years, the Church is once again updating it’s hymnbook, in hopes that the new version will better meet the needs of its members around the world.

Better news!

The Church is actively seeking members’ feedback on which hymns will be included (you can make your voice heard here). One intriguing question on their survey asks “What currently included hymns or songs, if any, might be candidates to drop from a new hymnbook or songbook?”

Why might certain hymns be dropped? According to the Church, all national hymns will be excluded, making the book more globally inclusive. I’m certain a handful will get scratched because, to be frank, no one ever sings them anyway (here’s looking at you, “Like Ten Thousand Legions Marching”). Others might be somewhat culturally insensitive or doctrinally questionable, and a handful may be determined to be alienating to new visitors. (Have you ever tried to persuade an investigator that the Church is not a cult immediately after singing “In Our Lovely Deseret”? Because I have. It’s not fun.)

“Praise to the Man” may fall in this final category. While the song is beloved by many, a growing number feel it sends a very questionable message about the role Joseph Smith plays in our theology. While we emphatically (and honestly) maintain that we do not worship the prophet Joseph Smith, it can look pretty bad to outsiders when we open a book called Hymns and collectively command nations and kings to praise, extol, revere, honor, and crown him. After all, by definition, a hymn is “a religious song or poem of praise to God or a god.”

The fact is, we are singing “Praise to the Man” in a way it was never meant to be sung. I’m not just referring to its current role as a hymn in worship services; the entire bouncy, happy manner in which we sing it is completely with odds with how the song was originally intended. The very tune we use contradicts the song’s true somber nature. Learning a bit of the song’s history can help us understand how.

William W. Phelps, author of "Praise to the Man" and 14 other songs in our current hymnbook, was an off-and-on friend of the prophet Joseph Smith, who at one point not only left the Church, but provided false evidence against it to Missouri authorities. Due in no small part to Phelps’s lies, Joseph Smith and several others spent several harsh winter months in Liberty Jail.

Phelps eventually returned to the Church and wrote a letter to the prophet Joseph, begging for forgiveness. Smith responded mercifully, “Believing your confession to be real, and your repentance genuine, I shall be happy once again to give you the right hand of fellowship, and rejoice over the returning prodigal... ‘Come on, dear brother, since the war is past, for friends at first, are friends again at last.” Phelps returned, their friendship was restored, and, 4 years later, the prophet was murdered.

Within five weeks of Joseph Smith’s death, Phelps (who also delivered the prophet’s eulogy), penned the lyrics to a song he simply titled “JosephSmith”. The lyrics have barely changed over the years, though, initially Phelps angrily wrote “Long shall his blood, which was shed by assassins, Stain Illinois” rather than the softer “Plead unto heav’n” we sing today. The intended tune to the song, however, could not have been more different.

The modern hymnbook (and each official hymnbook since 1889) uses a slightly modified version of a tune called “Scotland the Brave” which is most commonly known as one of the unofficial national anthems of Scotland. It’s a moving march song. It is happy, triumphant, celebratory, and energetic. It is also completely wrong.

When Phelps originally published his lyrics in the August 1, 1844 edition of Times and Seasons, he suggested that the words be sung to a tune called “Star in the East.” Suffice it to say, it’s a bit different from “Scotland the Brave.”

Watch this video of “Star in the East” sung with its original lyrics (as far as I am aware, no recording of this tune has ever been made using Phelps’s words):

You can also listen to this version without sung lyrics (obtained via hymnary.org), and imagine the message Phelps’s words would have conveyed in this slower, haunting, minor melody.

This is the tone that Phelps is trying to invoke; these are the feelings he’s trying to express. “Praise to the Man” is not a celebration. It’s not a brisk, military march, and it’s certainly not a hymn. “Praise to the Man” is a dirge - a song of mournful anguish from a man who lost his mentor and dear friend a mere month ago. It’s a song of bittersweet, melancholic contemplation, reverence, and loss. When Phelps writes “Death cannot conquer the hero again”, he’s not jeering at the murderers who can no longer hurt the prophet; he is consoling himself and others with his version of that desperate cliche we all use when someone we love is killed: “At least he’s in a better place.”

I have no idea if “Praise to the Man” will be in the hymnbook’s new addition. I don’t know if it should be, either. I do feel, however, that we do a great disservice to Joseph Smith, William W. Phelps, and ourselves when we take those words out of the mournful context in which they were written. 


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