History of Hymns: 'He Came Down'

“He Came Down”
Trad. Cameroonian Song
The Faith We Sing, 2085

He came down that we may have love;
he came down that we may have love;
he came down that we may have love;
Hallelujah for evermore.

“So the word of God became a human being and lived among us.” (John 1:14a, J.B. Phillips N.T.)

This song appears to have Cameroonian origins. John Bell (b. 1949), a troubadour of the Iona Community in Scotland, first heard it in the mid-1980s when officiating the wedding of a Cameroonian couple in Frankfort, Germany. Hymnologist Nancy Graham noted, “They requested that it be sung unaccompanied with the guests in a circle, reminiscent of the ring shout prevalent in the music of enslaved Africans in North America and the Caribbean” (Graham, Canterbury Dictionary). Copyrighted by the Wild Goose Resource Group in 1986, Bell included it in his first collection of songs from the world church, Many and Great (1990). In this collection, Bell states, “The song was experienced in Germany at an international conference in 1986 when a group of Presbyterians from Cameroon broke into a song and dance. They moved in a circle, counterclockwise, using their hand to beckon Christ, as it were, from heaven to earth” (Bell, 1990, p. 15). Bell transcribed the song from this experience.

This song is quickly learned through oral/aural transmission because of the repetition of the lines in each stanza with only one word in subsequent stanzas. Most hymnals include “love,” “peace,” and “joy.” Others add “hope,” “light,” and “life.” In the oral tradition style of sub-Saharan Africa, a lead singer prompts the next stanza with the question, “Why did he come?” The stanzas suggest that this song is most appropriate during Advent when many congregations light the candles of hope, peace, joy, and love on successive Sundays. Hymn writer and hymnologist Carl P. Daw Jr. correctly notes that the “intention of the text is not narrative but anamnetic: it is not meant to impart new knowledge but to evoke memory and thankfulness” (Daw, 2016, p. 143).

Nancy Graham cites an observation by Ghanaian ethnomusicologist J.H.B. Nketia (1921–2019), who suggested an affinity between the melody of this song and the Caribbean Christmas calypso, “The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy.” They both begin with a rising perfect fourth and have a strikingly similar melodic arch in each subsequent phrase. The rising fourth and rising sequence of each of the following phrases is also a pattern familiar to many oral tradition melodies. “The Virgin Mary,” undoubtedly a product of the African diaspora in the West Indies, may have traveled to West Africa via missionaries (Daw, 2016, p. 144). Thus, a common origin cannot be ruled out.

United Methodist minister John Thornburg (b. 1954) prepared a bilingual English and French collection, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing/Mille Voix pour Chanter tes Louanges (2009), for the United Methodist mission in Cameroon. Nigerian composer Godwin Sadoh (b. 1965) included this song as a Nigerian composition in his collection Ę Korin S’Oluwa (2005). As Thornburg notes, the border between the adjacent countries of Cameroon and Nigeria is porous. He verifies that the song is widely sung in Anglophone Cameroon. While West Africans undoubtedly respond physically when singing this song (and most songs), Thornburg indicated that a Presbyterian missionary suggested the counterclockwise circle dance mentioned by Bell was usually reserved for “singing competitions” and not a normative performance practice (Westermeyer, 2010, p. 19).