Yesterday, in our Word of the Week, which was home, I reminisced a little about the town in Pennsylvania where I grew up, a bittersweet experience for me. In case you’re wondering, the town is Archbald, right in the heart of the old anthracite coal mining district. Already by the time I was a boy, many of the things that characterized the town at i…

We scheduled our Word of the Week to go out on Monday as usual, but just see now that it did not go out. So here it is now, and we hope better late than never! When Joseph the patriarch was dying, he asked his brothers to make sure that his bones would not stay in Egypt. “God will surely visit you,” he said, “and bring you out of this land, unto th…

I’ve been holding a place for today’s Sometimes a Song for a very long time. And when we were discussing a choice for our Word of the Week, I mentioned to Tony that someday he’d have to give me an chance to use “Georgia on My Mind.” So, he immediately piped up with the word, farmer! I’ll take that challenge (but I do think that Tony should have off…

Time for a comedy for our Film of the Week! For a while after World War II, when a lot of soldier boys were going back to the farm they missed or they dreamed of carving out for themselves, there were a lot of comedies set out in the country. They were mostly good-humored, with some merry laughter at the supposedly simple ways down on the farm, and…

Our Word of the Week is farmer, so it’s fitting for us to choose a hymn to cheer the hearts of those who work the soil. “But,” you say, “it’s January! Nobody’s going to plow the soil in January.” Well, nobody will who lives in the north temperate zone and above. In the tropics or in Australia or Brazil or Argentina, a good lot of soil-working will …

Hello out there, all you who embody our Word of the Week! My father, who by preference sold insurance in the rural counties east and south and north of us rather than in our own urban and suburban county, always liked farmers, for their friendliness and their quite literally down-to-earth ways. The feeling was mutual, and that’s why he became so su…

From the Brothers Grimm, those great historians and linguists and collectors of folk stories from all over the German-speaking lands, we’ve got a story about a funny little man, half helpful and half malicious, who has a secret he manages to keep until his own glee gets the better of him! Enjoy this one with the children, and please let us know if …

The scene is a bright borderland between heaven and a drab city below. One of the blest, a cheery Scotsman named George, has come down from the regions of bliss to meet our narrator and to teach him the secrets of genuine joy and love, human and divine. They’re secrets, not because God hides them, but because we human beings, such as we are, have w…

The author of our Hymn of the Week, John Keble, was the sort of man it is hard to imagine outside of the nineteenth century, and that is to the credit of his age. His father was an Anglican minister, devout, intelligent, highly cultured, and satisfied with a modest vicarage in Gloucestershire, in the lovely surroundings of the Cotswolds. The elder …

Here at Sometimes a Song I’ve often commented that the great flowering of American popular music in the mid-twentieth century came about as a result of the convergence of talents and circumstances, and sometimes of hardship or happenstance. This week’s selection is an example of such a song. “It Was a Very Good Year” was far from the first song wri…

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a poem that schoolchildren once loved, and that has given us the idea of the “albatross around the neck,” the punishment that attends to the Ancient Mariner in our ballad today, because without any motivation, he had so little regard for the beautiful creature of God that he shot it, for no reason but that he could. T…

We’ve had illness in our family for the past week, so the New Year, 2025, is off to a rocky start. I had in mind a lovely Grammy-winning song to share for Sometimes a Song, but — sort of the way Kurt Weill describes it in his beautiful “September Song” — time got away from me. So I will leave you with a mystery song to look for next week. Some of o…