page_title: The Lord's my Shepherd
section_title: Tune
hierarchical_section_title: The Lord's my Shepherd / Tune
caption_attribution_description: English: David Grant plaque, arranger of "Crimond", composed by Jessie Seymour Irvine – see Wikipedia. St Clement's East Church, Aberdeen.
context_page_description: "The Lord's my Shepherd" is a Christian hymn. It is a metrical psalm commonly attributed to the English Puritan Francis Rous and based on the text of Psalm 23 in the Bible. The hymn first appeared in the Scottish Psalter in 1650.
  It is commonly sung to the tune Crimond, which is generally credited to Jessie Seymour Irvine.
context_section_description: "The Lord's my Shepherd" is in common metre (a metre of 8.6.8.6) and it is most commonly sung to the hymn tune Crimond, named after Crimond Church in the Aberdeenshire town of Crimond. It is thought that this tune was composed by Jessie Seymour Irvine, daughter of Rev. Alexander Irvine, minister of the Crimond Parish. Jessie was a keen musician and was undergoing training as an organists at the nearby town of Banff. According to some accounts, she composed the tune in 1871 as an exercise for a composition class and it was first performed at evening worship at Auchterless Parish Church. Dissatisfied with her own harmonisation, she asked David Grant, a musician from Aberdeen, to reharmonise it for her.
  At the time, Grant was collaborating with a group of associates compiling hymns and metrical psalms from across the North of Scotland with the intention of publishing them in a new hymnal. His colleagues were Robert Cooper, precentor of Peterhead Parish Church, William Clubb, precentor at Crimond, and William Carnie, a journalist from Aberdeen. Irvine submitted the tune to Carnie. The Northern Psalter was published in 1872, but with Crimond credited solely to David Grant as its composer. The new hymnal was very successful and sold over 70,000 copies. 
  Irvine died in 1887, and the attribution of the tune to Grant went unchallenged for many years. In the 1940s, a rival claim emerged in form of a letter written in 1911 by Jessie's sister, Anna Irvine, to the Rev Robert Monteith, then the minister of Crimond Church. In the letter, Anna claimed that the tune had been composed by Jessie and that Grant had only provided the harmony. Anna's account was contested by the editors of The Northern Psalter, who wrote to Monteith claiming that she had confused the tune with another entitled Ballantine that Jessie had composed and submitted to them for publication. After the account provided by Anna's letter was published in the Bulletin of the Hymn Society and The Scotsman newspaper, many hymnals began to credit Irvine instead of Grant as the composer, and the hymn is now regularly — but not universally — attributed to Jessie Seymour Irvine. Anna's claim has latterly been disputed by some scholars who favour Grant, and some hymnals still credit Grant as the composer. The controversy was discussed in Ronald Johnson's 1988 article in the Hymn Society Bulletin, "How far is it to Crimond?", and by the newspaper columnist Jack Webster in the Glasgow Herald, in which he expressed support for the Jessie Irvine claim in his column, based on accounts from Crimond inhabitants who had been personally connected with Irvine.
  The putative composers both have memorials; a memorial plaque at St Clement's East Church in Aberdeen commemorates David Grant, a former parishioner there, as the composer, while inside Crimond Parish Church, a set of four etched glass panels installed in 2002 commemorate Jessie Seymour Irvine as the composer.
  A later publication of the hymn tune in the 1929 Scottish Psalter was re-harmonised by the editor, Thomas Cuthbertson Leithead Pritchard (1885-1960).
  The Crimond setting has proved to be very popular, and has been sung at many notable religious occasions, such as the Wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947, for which occasion a special descant was composed.
  The hymn is sometimes also sung to other tunes such as Brother James's Air by James Leith Macbeth Bain or  Martyrdom by	Hugh Wilson (1824).
caption: David Grant (1833-93) plaque
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