Tribute to George Beverly Shea by Rob Ireland, the band and the choir. "I am the way" with Nelson Weippert.

Tribute to George Beverly Shea.

I am going to place these artifacts from an earlier era.  Now here you can take a look at them later on. I am just going to put them up here because there are relevant to what I am going to have to speak off in the next few minutes.

This is the Billy Graham crusade. These are LP's of course, and Billy Graham crusade and this is Billy Graham's right hand man, George Beverly Shea.

Now, I was asked to say a few things about this because, we thought it would be appropriate to do a tribute to George Beverly Shea today.

Three weeks ago Nancy brought in a new song for us to work on with some band flute.  It is called the "The wonder of it all" and I looked at the title and it said George Beverly Shea and the name brought up a ballad in my head and I said: He is an evangelist isn't he or something? And they said “ yea he was”.

The next week, we came in and between the time that Nancy had found the song and the following practice, up on Google came that George Beverly Shea had died at the age of 104 and it was basically that week.

 So I started looking a little bit at that guy George Beverly Shea and found out a little bit about him, and my curiosity was aroused right away when I saw he was a Canadian. He was born in Winchester, Ontario which is just a little bit north of Upper Canada Village. We all know where that is. So that aroused my appetite even more. So I decided to look into him and find out a bit more history about him.

 I found out that he was a two time Grammy award winner. He won the Grammy back in the mid 50's I think for an LP that he did, but more significantly the... whoever issued Grammy awards deemed it appropriate to award him a life time achievement award at the age of 102, in the year 2011; the oldest  person to achieve a Grammy award. So when he was 102 years old, he picked up another award.

And that led me to look into his music as well, and start listening to his music and I found out that he is widely regarded as being America’s most beloved Gospel Singer. Now usually, when I think of Gospel Singing,  I think of Mahalia Jackson and all black groups standing up singing but this was a bleu eyed, white Gospel singer who was recognized as being North America's most beloved Gospel singer.

So I figure I should know more about this guy and I went to You Tube and I listened to a few tunes that he had done. He was a composer as well as a singer. And they sounded..., they struck a real auditory memory cord in my head and I thought I have heard this before.

Then it came to me that this guy was..... When Billy Graham was running his crusades in the 50's, the 60’s, the 70’s, the 80's and the 90's...George Beverly Shea was his right hand man. Billy Graham preached, George Beverly Shea sang, and every time that Billy Graham was up there preaching, George Beverly Shea was up there singing. He was Billy Graham's favourite singer and he sold. He was a baritone and had a very very recognized deep deep voice.

It came to be that this voice was in my head because when I was growing up in the 50's, I was born in 47. Incidentally 1947 was when George Beverly Shea joined the Billy Graham's organization and started working with Billy Graham, just the year I was born.

Well growing through the 50’s, TV was a pretty rare thing you know. We did not have one in our house until the 60's, but you could always see a TV when you went to Grandma's because Grandma had a TV. Grandma was in Toronto. My grand-parents, my Father's parents were deeply religious people. He was a sextant (Sexton) at Prospect Community Church in Toronto. And my grand-mother was an hardened Billy Graham fan, and she followed him right up until she died.

So I watched a lot of TV, you know, as well as watching Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger or whatever else was on, I got to see Red Skelton and I got to see a lot of Billy Graham as well. So this George Beverly Shea being his main man, all this auditory memory stuff came from those days hearing him sing for these crusades. He was a composer as well as a singer.

He has got 7 songs to his merit that we know of; two of them are quite popular and they are the ones we were able to find music for. So the band has worked at two of his songs. We are going to play them both. One of them we are going to sing on, and then after that there is one more segment of this tribute that I will invite you to join us in as well. Right now we are going to do two songs: the first one is “I’d rather have Jesus" This is one that George Beverly Shea wrote in 1932. This is even before he joined Billy Graham. And the second one is his more, most popular one probably, which he wrote in 1955 I think it is, and it is called the “The wonder of it all".

I'D RATHER HAVE JESUS 

 I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold;
I'd rather be His than have riches untold;
I'd rather have Jesus than houses or lands;
I'd rather be led by His nail-pierced hand 

Refrain:
Than to be the king of a vast domain,
Or be held in sin's dread sway;
I'd rather have Jesus than anything
This world affords today.

I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause;
I'd rather be faithful to His dear cause;
I'd rather have Jesus than worldwide fame;
I'd rather be true to His holy name 

He's fairer than lilies of rarest bloom;
He's sweeter than honey from out the comb;
He's all that my hungering spirit needs;
I'd rather have Jesus and let Him lead

WONDER OF IT ALL

There's the wonder of sunset at evening,
The wonder as sunrise I see;
But the wonder of wonders that thrills my soul
Is the wonder that God loves me.

Refrain
O, the wonder of it all! The wonder of it all!
Just to think that God loves me.
O, the wonder of it all! The wonder of it all!
Just to think that God loves me.

Verse 2
There's the wonder of springtime and harvest,
The sky, the stars, the sun;
But the wonder of wonders that thrills my soul
Is a wonder that's only begun.

Now the last part of this involves you. George Beverly Shea, he had several signature songs, that were associated with him as a singer. They weren’t his own compositions. They were compositions of other people. “The old rugged cross" was one , "He’s got the whole world in his hand"  was another, but probably the most famous of it all is "Oh Lord my God How Great Thou art" We are going to invite you to sing that but …freeze!!!  before we do that, I want to mention a few things about this hymn. The hymn is a Swedish hymn , was translated by somebody named Hine, into English. But George Beverly Shea did not like some of the words in the first verse I do not know why but  he decided to change them. Take a look at that hymn Verse 1:

O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder

Consider all the works Thy hand hath made. 


The original translation was not world, it was works. George Beverly Shea did not like that. He discarded singing “works"

And the second one is

I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed;

The original translation of that was the mighty thunder. He decided to change that to “rolling” thunder.

His renditions became so popular in the culture that the original words were forgotten even in our hymn books and George Beverly Shea's version is the one we adopted.

The other thing to say about that is that when George Beverly Shea was at his height,  I guess in the 1950's, he did a stint in one of his crusades in New York City in the Madison Square Gardens, the old Madison square gardens by the train station, and they did  3 months of  crusades at the old Madison Square Gardens  and George Beverly Shea opened each one of these crusades and on  100 consecutive nights, one hundred consecutive nights opened it with his rousing rendition of  "Oh Lord my God How Great Thou art"  So if you will join us in singing .


How Great Thou Art 
Lyrics by George Beverly Shea


O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

George Beverly Shea, left, is shown with his wife, Karlene, in his North Carolina home on Jan. 13, 2009. He died Tuesday at age 104. (Chuck Burton/Associated Press) http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/04/17/george-beverly-shea.html

Awaithing text from Mr Weippert.....