How My Ancestor Didn’t Write The Fight Song
The high school band played Willia
m Sanderling’s ”Lowly Sheep” at the homecoming football game one year, but sped-up so folks wouldn’t recognize it. When you heard it fast you’d never know it was a sacred hymn – it sounded just like a fight song, and a pretty good one at that. In fact, it nearly became the official fight song of the Sycamore Shadows High School Fighting B
uttonballs, and would’ve been had not Patter Felch, who’s on the school board and the most conservative elder of the Sycamore Church of the Lost Wayfarers, bought a used cassette player from “Udders” Cubbage’s garage sale after her husband Big Benny Cubbage was killed by a tractor. Patter – that’s not his real name, folks call him that on account of the way he walks, like a duck – took it to the football game and recorded the band performing the song. He was listening to it on the way home when the batteries began to die. The tape slowed, he recognized the hymn at once, and voted against it at the next board meeting, but not (more…)
William Sanderling and the Lowly Sheep
My triple-great grandfather William Sanderling was a sheep farmer in the mid-19th century. His stock was directly descended from Thomas Jefferson’s sheep, which he bought from George Washington, who had received them as a gift from the Marquis De Lafayette. So they were French sheep. William Sanderling gave up farming after becoming a successful songwriter, made a wagon load of money at it, and eventually built a whopping big music store where Hibb’s Dept. Store is now located. Known as Sanderling’s Wonderful Music Emporium, at one time it was one of the largest music stores in the country and sold instruments from violins to banjos as well as sheet music of his spirituals, which were shipped to all corners of the earth except for Islamic countries. Many of the church tunes you’ve had stuck in your head, if you go to church enough for them to stick, were written by William Sanderling. Find yourself singing a hymn one Sunday morning with a sheep metaphor in the lyrics? It‘s likely one if his, for he may have left the sheep but the sheep never left him. (more…)
