One good thing about having beginner-friendly Sacred Harp weekly singing is that you can ask questions about any aspect of singing, including individual songs. And you can do it between songs. It's different from the usual breakneck pace of a song after song after song with no breaks, delays, or discussion. So I took an opportunity to ask the old-timers about something that has puzzled me for a while: how is the treble part of the second half of 169t Morning supposed to be sung? There are three phrases in there (A-A-B) when the notes accommodate about... uh... two and a half. If I stick to two, which of the two should it be? A-A or A-B? Or am I supposed to somehow squeeze in all three into those eighth-notes, scansion be damned?
It turns out, you are supposed to sing A-B, and to draw out a certain syllable over the whole measure filled with eighth-notes that are connected with a ligature. After that, several people told me that they were equally baffled by this, and always sang it incorrectly, because they tried to adjust to what other trebles around them were singing, and those were all over the place.
It's always funny to me when everybody pretends they understand what they are doing, but when you raise a question, it turns out that half of the people had no idea.
Aye, I had a look and realised this was how it was meant to work a few days back, I'd say 163t is probably the hardest one in the book for this, older tunebooks used to be even more awkward for this kind of thing; here for instance is how 200 Edom looks in the Hesperian Harp:
the "he sends, etc. to cheer, etc." lines in a couple of the books are truly a nightmare (for me personally, at least) -- I'm generally reasonably good at guessing wonky scansion, but not if I can't see the notes and the words at the same time! and I can't memorize the words if I'm not seeing them regularly!
It's such a problem for most people that they actually made "replacement of 'etc.' with lyrics" one of the explicit goals of the 2012 Cooper revision.
