Ritual Songwriting for the Musically Inept

With the recent flap about Z. Budapest wanting to assert her copyright for "We All Come from the Goddess", there has been an undertone among many pagans of "But if we can't use that song, we don't have anything else that we can use!" The general excuse that I hear is "I can't write a song because I don't know anything about music."

 

Writing a song for ritual doesn't have to be a taxing experience, nor do you need to be a closet Mozart to make it work. Here's a simple method for creating a ritual song, along with a Beltane song that I'm writing on-the-spot for anyone to use.

 

Step 1: Find a tune that you know, can sing, and is in the public domain. (NOTE: If you plan to write your own tune later on, skip this step.) A good source for tunes is old folksongs, nursery rhyme tunes, old religious hymns (for instance, many non-Christians still know the tunes for hymns by folks like Charles Wesley or Isaac Watts), or spiritualist songs. For this example, I will be using the tune to "Here We Go 'Round the Mulberry Bush".

 

Step 2: Count out the syllables in each line. For this example, here's how it would go:

Here we go 'round the mulberry bush (9)

The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush (10)

Here we go 'round the mulberry bush (9)

So early in the morning. (7)

 

In your song, initially you'll want to keep to those number of syllables per line, otherwise people will trip over how to fit more syllables in the line or how to make the tune fit when there's not enough syllables. Later on you can tweak the number of syllables per line as needed.

 

Step 3: Brainstorm concrete images in line with why you are writing this. For this step, write a list of the images that you want to evoke with this song. In this particular case, since this is a Beltane song, I'm going with images like the maypole, dancing, flowers, ribbons, colors, men and women, spring, love, and so on. My specific purpose for this Beltane song is something that can be danced (either for dancing a maypole or just dancing in the joy of springtime).

 

Step 4: Write a poem to fit the themes and syllable count--if you can have it rhyme, so much the better, as that makes it easier for people to remember, but that isn't required.

Here's what I came up with after about three minutes:

Hail to Beltane, come call in the Spring

Women and men with flowers they bring

Twirl around as we dance and we sing

Hail to Beltane and to Spring

 

For this particular song, additional verses could easily be written to help explore more of the Beltane energies, and this song would do incredibly well for a maypole dance.

 

Step 5: Sing it. Sing it again. Sing it another time. Singing your work out loud helps you determine if there's any clunky phraseology or problems with the tempo. For this particular version, although the last line matched the syllable length of the original source, I added the word "the" before Spring because it seemed to make the song flow better. Thus, the final version is:

 

Hail to Beltane, come call in the spring

Women and men with flowers they bring

Twirl around as we dance and we sing

Hail to Beltane and to the Spring!

 

Step 6: Share as you are moved to do so. If you want to keep this in your personal practices or in a small group setting, that is absolutely your right. If you want to share it with the greater world, knowing that it may be used, misused, adapted, changed, or whatever, that is entirely your choice.

 

The whole process to write this essay and the song contained therein took less than 30 minutes. So for anyone who says that it would take forever or be impossible to write original songs for your practices, give it a try--it isn't as hard as you think.