Why Only the Words?

The most common question I get about Hymnbook Treasures, after "how did you pick which hymns to include," is some version of: why just the words? Why leave out the music entirely?

It's a fair question, especially for a project built around hymns — a form of writing that for most people is inseparable from its tune. Ask someone to say "Amazing Grace" without singing it, and you'll usually get a few notes anyway, whether they mean to or not.

But leaving out the music was intentional, and there are a few reasons I keep coming back to.

The words came first.

Most people don't realize this, but the vast majority of hymns started life as poems, not songs. Isaac Watts wasn't a composer — he was a pastor and theologian who thought the church's hymnody was thin and wanted better words for God's people to pray. Catherine Winkworth wasn't writing melodies — she was translating German devotional poetry into English so English-speaking congregations could carry it too. Many hymn texts sat unsung for years, sometimes decades or centuries, before a tune ever got attached to them. Even now, most hymnals list a hymn's meter alongside its title for a reason: the words were built to survive being set to more than one tune, because the words were never dependent on any single tune to begin with.

That means when you read a hymn stanza on its own, you're not missing half the work. You're getting the original thing — a piece of writing made by an ordinary person doing their best to say something true about God, without a melody to lean on for help.

The Psalms did this too.

You don’t have to look outside Scripture to find this same pattern. Long before any hymn writer picked up a pen, God’s people were singing the Psalms — a hymnbook of their own, tucked into the middle of the Bible. Several Psalms open with a musical notation right in the text: "according to Gittith," "according to Shoshannim," "to the tune of Muth-labben." Those were real instructions to a real musician, naming a tune that worshippers in the Temple, and later the synagogue, would have recognized instantly.

That tune is gone now. We have no idea what "Gittith" actually sounded like. What survived, across three thousand years, is the poetry itself — the imagery, the parallel lines, the prayer. And it turned out that was enough. Every chant setting, every metrical psalter, every worship song that borrows a line from Psalm 23 or Psalm 100 is doing exactly what a hymnal does with a text like "Amazing Grace": putting a tune to inspired words that are just as meaningful without music as they are with the music.

Words hold still. Music moves.

Music happens in time. A verse comes and goes at whatever tempo the song sets, and then it's gone, on to the next line. Words on a page don't do that. You can stop in the middle of a sentence. You can read the same four lines three times in a row. You can sit with a single phrase — "far as the curse is found," say, or "naught be all else to me" — for as long as you need to, instead of however long the music gives you.

There's something to the idea that the gospel sometimes lands better in that kind of stillness than it does in sound. Not because music isn't a gift — it clearly is, and I hope you'll scan the QR code and go listen to every hymn in this calendar sung the way it was meant to be sung. But a quiet minute with a single stanza, no melody pulling you forward, is its own kind of listening. Sometimes silence is where a line finally gets through.

One text, many tunes.

My father, in the foreword to this calendar, points out that most hymnbooks include a hymn's meter for a practical reason — so a worship leader can pair the same words with a different tune depending on the occasion. He even suggests trying "Amazing Grace" to the tune of "House of the Rising Sun" just to prove the point. Try it. (Or listen to Sarah Sparks singing it on YouTube.) It's the same words doing something different. That flexibility only works because the text has its own integrity, apart from any one melody.

So that's the short answer to "why only the words." Because the words were the whole hymn once, long before anyone added a tune — just ask the Psalms, whose original tunes are three thousand years gone while their words are still being sung every Sunday. Because sometimes stillness says more than sound does. And because a good hymn text is sturdy enough to stand on its own — which is really all Hymnbook Treasures is asking you to notice, one stanza a day.

Of course, if a verse catches you and you want to hear it the way it's traditionally sung, that's exactly what the QR code on every page is for.