George Frederick Root’s purpose was clear, and so he did not ‘beat around the bush’. “Why Do You Wait?”, he asked rather pointedly, as he considered how to pose life’s most important question, perhaps as he sat in an office or in his Chicago-area home one day in 1878. As he approached his senior years, George may have felt more than ever that spiritual warfare was in progress, and that someone he knew – perhaps more than one – was in mortal danger on this battlefield. How many sermons had he heard, in which a minister issued a futile call for someone within earshot to make the life-saving choice? What event, perhaps an especially well-constructed moment or sequence of events, would push the reluctant soul to take that long-awaited step? Well-reasoned messages had been spoken, followed by shrugged shoulders. Would a poignant query framed in a song at the right moment turn the key and open the door for someone? With his poetry put to music, George offered up what he must have thought was a straightforward and heartfelt petition – a question that maybe even the indifferent hearer could not avoid answering.
What circumstances were at work when George Root wrote his musical question as a 58-year-old musician are not recorded for us to appreciate almost 150 years later, but his life’s work and example up to that point are instructive. George Root was the consummate musical professional, and even as a teenager he possessed skills that few who knew him could have doubted would lead him into a lifelong career in this area. By his late 50’s, George had encountered probably hundreds or even thousands of students and others who could learn from this musical prodigy. He’d become fairly well-known during the Civil War era, due to his writing dozens of secular songs to encourage soldiers. Many of the songs were obviously crafted to spur on the men engaged in battles that needed to be fought and won, and so George must have sensed in his middle ages, some 10-15 years before ‘Why Do You Wait?’, that there was no reason to try to ignore a war. Meet it head on. And so, he called on his skill as a poet and tune-writer to wage his own kind of battle in another kind of war in the 1870s. His most potent weapon was a question – the one that he used as the song’s title. This same question he restated in several ways, as he sought to elicit a response. ‘Why do you tarry…?’ (v.1), ‘what do you hope…?’ (v.2), ‘do you not feel…?’, ‘why not accept…?’(v.3), and ‘why not come…? (refrain)’, were several of the ways George reiterated his song’s title-question. But, perhaps the most effective method was just to keep echoing ‘why not?’ It’s as if George was intent on pestering the unresponsive hearer into action. ‘Don’t think I’m going to allow you to slink away without some kind of reply’, George declares. He seemed to think this wakeup call was indispensable, with three warning words he employs in his song’s final verse -- ‘danger’, ‘death’, ‘delay’.
Was George Root’s alliterative method with three ‘d’ words by accident? Coming from this lifelong musical artist, one can hardly imagine anything that George did musically was just coincidence. Perhaps it was because he’d already tried to coax with the positive…a ‘place in His sanctified throng’ (v.1) awaited, George had urged. His three alliterative words conversely summed up how this wartime observer felt – that these words are signposts marking the same awful path. No time to sugar-coat this, Root must have reasoned. It’s not just trouble, you court. And, the alternative is too wonderful to postpone any longer. The stakes get no higher, so that’s why George pulled no punches. Are you procrastinating, or instead committing? Listen to George’s words of advice. No one rides a fence into eternal salvation.
See this link for information on the author: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/r/o/o/t/root_gf.htm
See following link for song’s words: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/w/h/y/d/whydoyou.htm
See biography of author here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Frederick_Root
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