Jay Temples Music

06/06/2026

05/25/2026

"Lily of the Valley" - Hymn #50 in THE NEW CHURCH HYMNAL (1976)

05/17/2026

"Lily of the Valley," laying down vocals in BandLab DAW with pitch correct.

05/17/2026

The Lily of the Valley, a Victorian gospel hymn written in 1881 by British Methodist layman Charles W. Fry for the Salvation Army.
It originated in England, with Fry adapting its tune from the 1871 minstrel song “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.”
Its first known publication was in the Salvation Army magazine The War Cry on December 29, 1881.

05/08/2026

“Bright Morning Stars Are Rising” (also called “Bright Morning Star”) is a traditional Appalachian spiritual of anonymous authorship, likely originating in the 19th century United States within Baptist and camp-meeting traditions, blending African American spiritual influences with Anglo-American folk hymnody.

The earliest documented references include a textual appearance in Edward Billups’s 1854 Kentucky hymnal The Sweet Songster, showing the song was already in circulation before the Civil War and deeply embedded in early rural American religious life.

Biblically, the “Bright Morning Star” refers to Revelation 22:16, where Jesus Christ identifies himself as the “bright morning star,” symbolizing light, hope, and the dawning of salvation, with the imagery representing spiritual awakening and the triumph of divine light over darkness.

04/28/2026

“Bright Morning Star” is an American Christian folk hymn traceable to 19th‑century Appalachian church tradition, with a documented textual precursor in The Sweet Songster (Edward Billups, Kentucky, 1854), a Baptist hymn collection indicating circulation well before sound recording.

A clear Southern religious context appears in the obituary of Baptist elder Elias A. Stamey (1835–1917), published 17 August 1917 in the Minutes of the Avery County Baptist Sunday School Convention, which quotes him singing “Bright morning stars arising, day is breaking in my soul,” and later analysis by Charles and Peggy Seeger identified its structure as consistent with rural shape‑note and revival hymn practice in Kentucky and western North Carolina.

The song entered documented American folk history when recorded by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax from G.D. Vowell in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1937, and was canonized for mid‑20th‑century Christian folk and gospel circles through Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Christmas (Doubleday, 1953), which framed it explicitly as a traditional American hymn rather than a composed gospel song.

04/20/2026

If I live to see the day,
I'll listen to these noises
one day and recall it was
the best time of my life

04/20/2026

“I Can’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore” entered American folk tradition when it first appeared anonymously in the 1919 Joyful Meeting in Glory Song Book No. 1, circulating as an uncredited spiritual rooted in southern Black gospel practice. It moved deeper into American folklore through early vernacular recordings in the 1920s—especially Stovepipe No. 1 (1924) and the Kentucky Thoroughbreds (1927)—which treated it as a traditional, orally transmitted song.
This version of the song re-maps the interval structure of the vocal Melody into a minor pentatonic scale for a sorrowful sound.

04/19/2026

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot likely took shape in the mid‑19th century, drawing on older American frontier and camp‑meeting imagery of a heavenly vehicle carrying souls home. It first entered print in the 1870s through the Jubilee Singers’ tours, which helped stabilize its melody and wording. By the early 20th century it had become a widely recognized piece of American folklore, circulating in hymnals, school songbooks, and popular recordings.

04/14/2026

O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where coyotes howl and the wind blows free
In a narrow grave just six by three—
O bury me not on the lone prairie

It matters not, I've been told
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold
Yet grant, o grant, this wish to me
O bury me not on the lone prairie

I've always wished to be laid when I died
In a little churchyard on the green hillside
By my father's grave, there let me be
O bury me not on the lone prairie