Simple Gifts

Simple Gifts is a Shaker song, and the credit usually goes to Elder Joseph Brackett, who made it in 1848. Where he was at the time is argued about. Brackett had lived for years with the Shakers at New Gloucester, Maine, and was called to the ministry at Alfred, Maine that same year, and the Alfred community's own history never mentions the song. The first known reference to it is an advertisement for a concert given in October 1848 by the Shakers of New Gloucester.

The Shakers sang it as a dance. Several of their manuscripts mark it a quick dance, and the turning in the last lines of the verse reads as a set of steps: danced properly, everyone ends up back where they began. The oldest written copy of the melody is in the manuscript of Mary Hazzard of the New Lebanon community in New York, and the page follows its shape.

For almost a century it stayed inside the Shaker communities. Aaron Copland brought it out when he wrote a set of variations on it into his score for Martha Graham's ballet Appalachian Spring, first danced in 1944, and he set it again as a song in his first Old American Songs in 1950. In 1963 the English songwriter Sydney Carter wrote Lord of the Dance to an adapted version of the tune, and that hymn repeats the verse's first line where the Shaker song climbs to a new one. This page carries the Shaker song.

On a mandolin in G the whole song lies on two courses, from the open D up to the d at the fifth fret of the A course. The chorus is the part to practice. It opens on a held d and falls through the B to G, then sits on two long G's before climbing back up, and those long notes want a slow tremolo rather than a single stroke. The verse is almost all stepwise, and the one leap, from the D up to the G at the start of each line, is the same every time.