Dwight Armstrong was the brother of the founder of the cult I grew up in. His contribution to the cult was very limited, but very influential. See, he wrote the hymnbook.

It’s a very distinctive hymnbook with a purple cover. I have a copy. I bought it off of ebay. It’s the only thing I have of that cult that I actually value. There are one or two theological things that I’m happy they taught me, but for the most part, it was all trash.

But that hymnbook is a treasure.

It’s a treasure partly for personal reasons. Those songs has a very outsized influence on my childhood and my musical tastes. I very much doubt I’ll be able to compose anything that doesn’t at least have a couple of musical ideas from that book somewhere.

But it’s also a treasure because Dwight Armstrong was a genius.

I didn’t used to think he was. But after thinking about it, he was. Let me tell you why.

One of the first marks of a good writer – any kind of writer, and that includes composer, is that one must know their medium and the limitations thereof. Four part church hymns have a lot of constraints. First of all, you’re not writing for professional musicians. You’re writing for people, like my father, who have no musical education whatsoever and can’t carry a tune in a bucket or hit the broadside of a barn with a quarter note. So the melodies have to be simple and easily memorizable. You can’t go nuts with the melody, particularly with complexity. So that automatically limits you very much as to what you can do with the medium.

Secondly, the four parts have to be relatively easy to play on the piano. It’s okay for the piano to miss a note every now and then, but a relatively untrained or novice pianist should be able to sit down and play through the songs with a bit of practice. This, again, limits you very much as to what you can do with the medium.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the hymns have to be interesting. The congregation has to have a few hymns they really like, and that even make an emotional impact. If you write boring hymns with boring lyrics no one will want to sing them, and it’ll all turn out to be a waste of time.

Dwight Armstrong succeeded at all three of these things. But then, on top of it, he did something utterly groundbreaking that don’t think anyone has done before, and I’m not sure anyone has done since.

He wrote jazz hymns.

The harmonies of these hymns are amazing. There are thirteenth chords, seventh chords acting as dominants, chromatic passing tones… I could (and maybe even will, on another blog) analyze these hymns and find some really interesting harmonic things about these hymns. And the thing is, you don’t even have to know how they work. The jazz chords and the way he uses them creates a kind of fluidity that you’ll generally not find in four part chorale hymns.

I almost wish he’d done other, more serious stuff. I’m really curious as to what he could have come up with if he weren’t constrained by the demands of the medium of four-part chorale hymns.

One of the reasons my musical tastes are how they are, is that his jazz style shaped how I hear music. To this day, a secondary dominant or temporary modulation into the dominant using a secondary dominant has a particularly strong emotional impact for me, and it took me a long time to figure out it was because “Declare his Works to all Nations” was always played during the opening of the feasts – a particularly happy and anxiously awaited time for me as a child.

I’ve grown to appreciate what he did. I have not grown to appreciate what his brother did, how I was spiritually abused, etc., etc. These hymns are not all happy for me – one or two bring up a different kind of strong emotion that is not pleasant and I cannot easily identify. But they are emotional, and they are one of the few ties I have left to my childhood that are even remotely pleasant.

Dwight Armstrong was a fucking genius.

Herbert Armstrong was a fucking asshole.

But, even the worst pile of shit can contain a gold nugget. Or something like that.

I may yet spin up a blog where I analyze these hymns musically. And there are a couple of stinkers. For example, “Vindicate the Justice you Command”. This one was never, ever played, by anyone, as far as I remember. This is because it wasn’t really four part harmony. It had a melody and block chords in the piano. I think he phoned that one in. So he didn’t get it all right, but when he stayed in his lane… he really knew what he was doing.

(And when I say “analyze these hymns musically” that’s exactly what I mean. There have been other *ahem* blogs that dealt with these from a more reminiscing level, and that’s been done to death. I’m just interested in how they work and what can be learned from them musically.)