Talk:Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart

A fact from Give Thanks with a Grateful Heart appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 24 December 2016 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Christian song "Give Thanks With a Grateful Heart" was credited as unknown authorship when first released in 1986, despite being written by Henry Smith in 1978?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2016/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Give Thanks With a Grateful Heart.

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Football chants[edit]

First of all, the football chants are based on "Go West", not "Give Thanks". The first two lines have the same tune, but afterwards they diverge, and the football chants follow "Go West".

Secondly, even if the tune being used was "Give Thanks..." (and it isn't), the tune is not "mainly" used by Arsenal fans, although their version is a notable example. It is used by clubs all over Europe (mostly "Stand up, for ...") whilst also being used to abuse opposing fans ("You're shit, and you know you are" and many other variations). [1] et al. Black Kite (talk) 08:34, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree; other than the openings, the tunes are not actually all that similar. (Back when David Beckham was still playing, "One-nil to the Arsenal" was definitely not the main usage of the "Go West" chant in football; Victoria Beckham even specifically discusses her reaction to it in her autobiography.) ‑ Iridescent 08:49, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)You both seem to be missing the point. Give Thanks was written before Go West and its the first 4 lines that are the same.And its the tune of those 4 lines that are used for the chants. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 08:54, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Ha, I remember it well; up in Yorkshire we also had a ditty on the same subject based on the tune of "My Old Man's a Dustman"... Black Kite (talk) 08:53, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I already said this at the DYK page, but I'll repeat it here; Which came first out of "Go West" and "Give Thanks" is irrelevant, since the relevant section of both songs—and the football chant—is lifted direct from Pachalbel's Canon. (The composers almost certainly took it from Pachalbel independently; I find it vanishingly unlikely either that the Village People were basing their songs on obscure Christian music, or that that Henry Smith was following the West Coast gay scene.) ‑ Iridescent 09:20, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Well Smith wouldn't have been following Village people because as is sourced in the article, Give Thanks came before Go West. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 09:31, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You're missing two main points. After the first two lines, the tunes of "Give Thanks..." and "Go West" are different, and the Arsenal song (as well as all the other football chants) do use the "Go West" tune, not the "Give Thanks..." one (listen to the YouTube links I posted). So the hook was wrong. Secondly, as Iridescent said, what are the relative chances of a football chant being based on an obscure Christian hymn or a hit pop song? Black Kite (talk) 10:38, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The C of E / Royal C, I've re-reverted you. For starters, whether the Arsenal sources are reliable ones is neither here nor there, they are not about "Give Thanks". Similarly, "Give Thanks" is not an Arsenal song, as now quite a few people have explained to you.

You also added a new source: the "Rochford Methodist Church" newsletter[2] (I presume this is the one you wanted to add, your link didn't return a result). This is an unreliable source (a summary of a facebook discussion of a local church gruop), and in any case is about "well-known tunes that fit well-known hymns". No more, no less. This doesn't mean that they share a similar tune any more than both "The Wombling Song" and "Chariots of Fire" would share a tune with "Away in a manger". All it says is "the hymn can be song to this tune as well". Please stick to reliable sources with actual expertise on the subject and leave all poorly referenced bits out of it. Fram (talk) 11:49, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the Humanist source isn't useful either, it's simply one person writing that they've heard "One Nil to the Arsenal" and then somewhere else they hear "Give Thanks..." and note it's a similar tune. It doesn't actually say that one is based on the other - if they'd heard "Go West" they'd have presumably said the same thing. Black Kite (talk) 12:20, 11 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Go West"[edit]

A church near me plays a recording of a carillon version of this song frequently, and it's become of one my son's most favorites (because we can hear the church "bells" from the nearby train station when he's railfanning). So I was pleased to see that there's this article on it now.

For the longest time, though, I kept thinking it reminded of some other song. I kept thinking the other song was from a musical or something, until I finally realized it was "Go West" (I think I thought it was from a musical because of the way it's used in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but I may also have been remembering Can't Stop the Music (subconsciously, anyway), in which however it turns out it isn't used.

So I went to this talk page to see if anyone had noticed this, and if there was a reliable source for this. I found this section, which is interesting. But my original question is still there ... has any reliable source remarked on this? Given that the two songs are actually contemporaneous, has anyone asked Jacques Morali about this (someone should have, given the dispute over the song's authorship)? It would be one thing if "Go West" had lifted a traditional hymn, but a quite amusing other thing if this hymn turned out to have been plagiarized from a gay anthem . Daniel Case (talk) 20:22, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Daniel Case: The opening passage (the bit that's the same in this song and Go West) isn't original to either song—it's a passage from Pachalbel's Canon (from which an an extraordinary number of other songs also borrow). This YouTube clip of the Canon being played in a variety of different styles is probably the easiest way to see the similarity, as it strips out the traditional classical arrangement; the passage in question starts at about 2:05. ‑ Iridescent 21:16, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Iridescent:That would explain the chord progression (see also Ozzy Osbourne's "Goodbye to Romance" for another Pachelbel take) but not the melody line. The latter could be enough to justify an infringement lawsuit, AFAIK. Daniel Case (talk) 21:41, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'd be prepared to bet a substantial sum that both songs derived independently from Pachalbel. It's vanishingly unlikely either that the Village People were listening to contemporary religious music from Virginia, or that Henry Smith was into the Californian gay club scene. ‑ Iridescent 21:48, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree with you, although the melody still sounds oddly similar. Maybe it was subconscious ... like George Harrison's failed defense (But not Robin Thicke's)

BTW, I'm not sure we can confidently say that "Go West" is directly inspired by the Canon. In the article, this claim is voiced in the section on the Pet Shop Boys version as there is nothing about the original writing of the song. And I had to go to archive.org to restore the link to the cited source, which I'm not even sure can be considered reliable, and which also only has Neil Tennant saying that Chris Lowe told him "Then Chris enticed me into it by pointing out that it was the same chord change as Pachelbel's Canon".

In short, we do not know that the original authors (Morali, who'd be more likely to know, as opposed to Willis, whose major contribution to the VP was the lyrics, and we're not sure about Belolo) were doing this on purpose. Daniel Case (talk) 22:02, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, there's no problem citing that Go West is taken from Pachalbel[3][4]—the omission is in Wikipedia's article, not the sources. ‑ Iridescent 22:31, 31 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That first source won't do; it's just the main page for the book (although the hard copy with a cite to the proper page would be fine. Not sure about the second; that seems to be the writer's finding, and I'd still like to read that the writers of "Go West" specifically had that in mind; the chords could easily have been a coincidental choice. Daniel Case (talk) 05:54, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I think the first source must be geo-blocking you on Google—to me, it's giving me page 106 which explicitly states '"Go West", based on Pachalbel's Canon in D". I agree that a direct quote from the band or their management would be preferable. ‑ Iridescent 09:46, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]