And we were finishing up dinner and discussing how the rhetoric of tyranny has become freshly relevant when it suddenly occurred to me to ask ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch if he knew the origin of the line "Let tyrants shake their iron rod," because it had come into my head, and then I realized I knew the next line and the lines that followed and a tune for the entire thing and it was obviously from the eighteenth century and I still had no idea what it was:
Let tyrants shake their iron rod
And slavery clank her galling chains
We fear them not; we trust in God
New England's God forever reigns
What it turns out to be is the first verse of William Billings' "Chester," a patriotic anthem of the Revolutionary War—and nowadays, the internet tells me, the unofficial anthem of New England, which I'd always thought was something by Jonathan Richman—and I have no idea where I picked it up. High school chorus would be the obvious suspect, since we once performed a setting of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" and another of Robert Frost's "Reluctance," but I certainly don't remember anything that name-checked Howe, Burgoyne, and Clinton. I know the tenor melody, not the treble harmony. I never saw HBO's John Adams (2008). Rob thinks I may have absorbed it simply by sheer osmosis of New England. I have no idea what to do about that except go make another corn pudding. In other musical news, "Married to a Mermaid" turns out to be a solid century older than I had always assumed from its association with music-hall and I am delighted. That one I did learn in high school, for Madrigals. Go know.
spatch if he knew the origin of the line "Let tyrants shake their iron rod," because it had come into my head, and then I realized I knew the next line and the lines that followed and a tune for the entire thing and it was obviously from the eighteenth century and I still had no idea what it was:Let tyrants shake their iron rod
And slavery clank her galling chains
We fear them not; we trust in God
New England's God forever reigns
What it turns out to be is the first verse of William Billings' "Chester," a patriotic anthem of the Revolutionary War—and nowadays, the internet tells me, the unofficial anthem of New England, which I'd always thought was something by Jonathan Richman—and I have no idea where I picked it up. High school chorus would be the obvious suspect, since we once performed a setting of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Old Ironsides" and another of Robert Frost's "Reluctance," but I certainly don't remember anything that name-checked Howe, Burgoyne, and Clinton. I know the tenor melody, not the treble harmony. I never saw HBO's John Adams (2008). Rob thinks I may have absorbed it simply by sheer osmosis of New England. I have no idea what to do about that except go make another corn pudding. In other musical news, "Married to a Mermaid" turns out to be a solid century older than I had always assumed from its association with music-hall and I am delighted. That one I did learn in high school, for Madrigals. Go know.
