Friday, November 13, 2015

Come let us eat

I heard this lovely call and response hymn on Sing for Joy today. But it was a choral arrangement (Schola Cantorum) which I can’t find on YouTube and I didn’t care for the drums and organ samples, so just a small item about the Liberian composer. I is a very popular communion hymn.

KWILLIA, Billema. b. ca. 1925. Kwillia is a literacy teacher and evangelist from Liberia in West Africa. He is best known for the hymn ‘Come, Let Us Eat’ (‘A va de laa mioo’), which has been included in several hymnals and ecumenical collections. Kwillia composed the hymn in the 1960s and it employs a characteristic call-response pattern. Margaret D. Miller (b. 1927) transcribed the hymn from a recording in a church service in 1969. This hymn, in the original Loma language and in Miller’s versification, appeared first in Laudamus, a hymnal for the international gathering of the Lutheran World Federation in Evian, France in 1970. (Dictionary of hymnology)

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