Before the Bread (SATB)

When setting a pre-existing lyric to music, I typically refrain from changing, omitting or “modernizing” words. So you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that I had accidentally substituted the word “bread” for the word “flour” when setting the following folk blessing:

Before the flour the mill,
Before the mill the grain,
Before the grain, the sun and rain,
The beauty of God’s will.

I found myself strongly resisting the correction, for I had become thoroughly attached to the sound of the word “bread.” Could I leave the mistaken word unchanged, I wondered, since this was after all a folk blessing?

I decided to delve deeper, and soon discovered that I was just one in a long line of liberty-takers! My first searches yielded these three-line versions:

Before the flour the mill,
Before the grain the earth and rain,
The beauty of God’s will.

Before the flour the mill,
Before the mill the grain,
Before the grain the sun, the earth, the rain.

Furthermore, subsequent searches revealed that I was also not the only person to use the word “bread.” Interestingly, these versions contained alternate names for God as well:

Before the bread the mill,
Before the mill the grain,
Before the grain the sun and the rain,
The beauty of Nature’s will.

Before the bread is the snowy flour,
Before the flour, the mill,
Before the mill, the field of wheat, the rain,
And the Father’s will.

So much for discovering the “original version” of this blessing! Emboldened by these various folk variations, I left my own inadvertent bread/flour word substitution unchanged.

No matter what words speak most strongly to you, I invite you to try to sing and engage with the words I chose to set, keeping in mind the universal sentiment behind this blessing.

-Elizabeth Alexander