He came down

He came down. Cameroon traditional.  In the mid 1980s, John Bell* officiated at a wedding in Frankfurt. ‘He came down’ was chosen for the ceremony by a couple from Cameroon. 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 (see ‘Ring shout’*). First printed by Wild Goose Publications in Many and Great: Songs of the World Church (Glasgow, 1990), it was copyrighted in 1986: the copyright is held by the Wild Goose Resource Group and GIA Publications, Inc. In that same year Bell participated in a meeting in Germany. A Presbyterian group spontaneously broke into...