Angry Words (Love One Another) -- Horatio Richmond Palmer

This 33-year-old music director must have heard and directed enough choral sounds that he really appreciated the female voice. That much could be said of Horatio Richmond Palmer when one discovers that he was the most likely author of the music and the words for something most commonly known as “Angry Words” (also may be known as “Love One Another”). What would cause an experienced, gifted musical director to use such a negative-sounding title? Others who later appreciated the song’s message perceived the title was downbeat, and so put a different spin on it by changing its label. Were there women who played an important role in Palmer’s life in 1867? Were there some disagreeable words – a dispute – that had erupted in Palmer’s world? (Maybe the Disputa by Raphael, shown here, is a celestially symbolic one, representing what Palmer sought to avoid [the elders debate the significance of the Communion in Disputa.]) Let’s see.

Horatio Palmer’s upbringing and his development, following his birthmother’s premature death,  owed much to how and who helped fill a gap in his life. His father was a single parent after Horatio’s mother died when he was three. By seven, Horatio was singing with the church choir that his father, Anson, directed. Horatio also apparently had a stepmother at some point (according to a comment this blogger received for a Sept. 18, 2011 entry made on another Palmer composition, ‘O Lord, Our Lord), but it seems likely that the church was playing a significant role in his young life. That he devoted his professional life to music seems to confirm how essential this mentorship at a young age was for Palmer. Over the next twenty to thirty years, Horatio continued to develop and take on musical enterprises, including choral music like his father. After directing a musical academy in New York for a decade, Palmer moved to Chicago and was director of a church choir when he was in his early 30s, and it was there he may have written “Angry Words”. The song’s expressions suggest someone or group, or perhaps Palmer himself, had regretted some hasty, ill-tempered remarks. If it wasn’t Palmer, could it have been an anonymous ‘DKP’, whose initials appear attributed to the song in some hymnals? Or, what is the role of the ‘Sunday School Teacher’, also alternately associated with the song in many hymnals? Could the song’s emphasis on the female voices indicate their importance to Horatio and the song message? Horatio also exhibits this female-voice inclination in some of his other works (see the 18 September 2011 blog entry), so one wonders if Palmer had learned some significant lessons from them along the way.  Over a century after its initial publication, a women named Betty Bender wrote another verse, shown in some hymnals, in 1992.  

The intended audience of  “Angry Words” is as important as whomever may have contributed to its composition. ‘Children’ in one repeated section of the song suggests kids may have been of most concern to Horatio. But, none of us ever really stop being children, especially when we argue. And, some anger is justifiable; even Jesus and His father have been angry, we read. Just pick up your bible and find these episodes. But, you’ll see the love episodes there, too. Perhaps Horatio was thinking that our angry episodes come too easily, versus God’s. Do your love expressions come as easily as His?  

The following sites show Palmer as the author, or his composition history:

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/a/n/g/angrywor.htm

http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/p/a/l/palmer_hr.htm

 

Site for Betty Bender, possibly the one associated with the song?: http://www.theicn.org/Templates/TemplateDefault.aspx?qs=cElEPTExMQ==