A Fussy Old Fuddy-Duddy

I have become an old fuddy-duddy (a person “who is old-fashioned and fussy”) when it comes to the way things were and the way things are now.  I’ve known some fuddy-duddies and I’m beginning to identify with them.  They were the church members who objected to hymns being played and sung as written (preferring to sing them as dirges rather than doxologies) and who rejected the introduction of any new hymn (unknown to them) even though it was in the hymnbook.  These Methodist fuddy-duddies had never heard or read John Wesley’s “Directions For Singing” even though printed in their hymnals and first published in 1761.  Wesley wrote of hymns, “Sing them exactly as they are printed…without altering or mending them at all, and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.”  He also wrote, “Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift your voice with strength.”  The fuddy-duddies wanted to sing the hymns the way they were sung in the growing-up years—to sing them the way they remembered them being sung.  They wanted to sing the “old” hymns—by which they meant those hymns familiar to them and those they were accustomed to singing (usually hymns only 50 years old).

In the church today new songs are taking the place of those in the traditional hymnbook.  Some call them “Praise Songs.”  To borrow Dr. Seuss’ language:  “I do not like them, Sam-I-am.”  I would not sing them here or there.  I would not sing them anywhere,  “I do not like them, Sam-I-am.” I know, I know, and I can’t believe it of myself,  I’ve become an old fuddy-duddy!

I like the hymns of  Isaac Watts (1674-1748) like “Joy to the World” (Psalm 98) or “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun” (Psalm 72). My favorite is “O God Our Help in Ages Past” (Psalm 90). Watts was a genius.  He was learning Latin by age 4, Greek at 9, French, which he learned via his refugee neighbors, at 11, and Hebrew at 13. Watts also wrote educational books on geography, astronomy, grammar, theology, and philosophy, as well as poetry and hymns.  

When Watts published his hymns in 1719 there were some fuddy-duddies who reacted.  They couldn’t recognize Psalm 98 in “Joy to the World” or Psalm 72 in “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun” or Psalm 90 in “O God Our Help in Ages Past.”  Why?  Watts thought the psalms “ought to be translated in such a manner as we have reason to believe David would have composed them if he had lived in our day.”  Thus, he had deliberately omitted large sections of the psalms and had the “nerve” to even change the meaning of those sections he did use.  Such “looseness” brought criticism.  “Christian congregations have shut out divinely inspired psalms and taken in Watts’s flights of fancy,” protested one fuddy-duddy.  Other fuddy-duddies dubbed his hymns as “Watts’s whims.” Some, like me, said:  “I do not like them, Sam-I-am.”

But, as Watts says in his hymn. “Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all who breathe away; they fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”  Someday the “Praise Songs” of today will be replaced by something new—and the fuddy-duddies of that age will have their day, too!