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IN A way quite unlike other forms of music, songs punch far above their weight. Simple verses and tunes in judicious combination can inspire nations and revolutions if the message and mood are right. Part hymns, part popular songs, yet distinctively neither, Sydney Carter's most notable lyrics such as "Lord of the Dance", "One More Step" and "When I Needed a Neighbour" belong to their own self- created category, yet none the less merit standing-room alongside the work of the world's most influential songwriters.
The words and music of these songs have assisted the rites of passage at countless baptisms, weddings and funerals. They have been consistently rated amongst the most frequently performed songs in British schools, and have been translated into languages as diverse as Spanish, Norwegian and Chinese. Above all - the ultimate accolade, perhaps, for any songwriter, though unhelpful to one like Carter whose living came entirely from his own music - they have frequently been mistaken as traditional material.
"Lord of the Dance", perhaps his best-loved and indeed most characteristic creation, has proved especially susceptible to reinterpretation on these grounds. Ever since Carter began singing "I danced in the morning / When the world was begun, / And I danced in the moon / And the stars and the sun" to audiences in the early 1960s, the song has sunk deeper into the national psyche. Now included in every kind of Christian denominational hymnbook, it is often, quite wrongly, considered to exist in the public domain, and therefore to be open to shameless plunder and adaptation by a variety of special interest groups from pagans to professional Celts.
Though this in itself suggests a remarkable universal appeal, how Carter came to write songs of such plasticity both in music and theological content is not so easily explained. Like many women and men of his generation, he was a late developer artistically, the Second World War having interrupted the formative years of his twenties and early thirties.
As a schoolboy in north London in the 1920s he had enjoyed community singing at Montem Street School, Islington, and later, singing hymns in chapel at Christ's Hospital, Horsham. As an undergraduate reading Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, he wrote poetry and dreamt...