[Perform-Talk] Resources for Electronic of Hymnals

[Chris Nusbaum]

Good Morning Fellow Musicians:

For many years I have struggled with accessing lyrics for hymns in order to sing them in church, whether in the choir or in the congregation. When I sing in the choir at my home church, I've often asked our director to email me the lyrics, assuming that she has time to do so. More recently, I discovered a wonderful Web site called hymnary.org which seems to have hymnals for most if not all Christian denominations. The problem is that some hymns, mostly those which were written between about 1940 and the present day, are still copyright-protected, which means that Hymnary is not allowed to publish them. So, if Mary picks one of those hymns, I'm stuck.

I'm an Episcopalian, and we use the 1982 Hymnal (the most recent hymnal published by the Church). It appears that NLS has a copy, but it's only available in hardcopy Braille, and I don't want to carry around multiple volumes of a book just to use 4 or 5 songs which might be found in 3 or 4 volumes. Besides, constantly flipping through the book to find the song I need would likely take away from the worship experience. Does anyone know of any resources for finding electronic copies of hymnals where I might look for ours?

Thanks,

Chris Nusbaum