Is the text this?

"O Mother of Perpetual Help
To thee we come imploring help
Behold us here from far and near
To ask of thee our help to be"

Thanks, Steve. I gave it a quick play-through, and unfortunately it's not the tune they were singing last night.

BTW, the other odd tune they were using came from the New St. Basil Hymnal, an odd tune for "O Salutaris" (in Latin) that I'd never heard before.

if they use those big white cards that have the prayers and hymn texts on them, I called the company that makes those and they sent me a couple pages that had several different hymn tunes with accompaniments for those and a few other marian hymns. If that doesn't work, then email me and I can see how to get you a copy of mine.

O yes, definitely!

There is no controlling organic growth!

The hymn that we sing evey Tuesday begins:

Quarter notes do-mi-re-mi-fa-mi-re-do

Change the tune? Horrors!

Nobody goes to a novena looking for music that's in good taste.

Now, this is a genuine difference of POV between musician communities.

In the folk music communities, this sort of thing is usually called "the folk process". In general, it's regarded as being either just organic growth or stuff that happens, or as something positive. And frankly, if the group singing a song changes the melody persistently, a lot of times it's because there was something lacking in the original composition. Unless the folk process is being carried out by the tone-deaf, it's usually very logical.

(Of course, this can be carried out to excess. I learned a song once from hearing it sung by people I didn't know from another part of the country. It sounded to me like they were really... um... monotone. But underneath, it was a good song. I'm reasonably used to hearing people sing who aren't good at it, and I figured out what the melody must really be from the guitar chords. The song was good, so I learned it and sang it for several years, spreading it around as much as I could, and always asking around after it. Finally, I found out who the original songwriter was, and ordered his CD. All those years, I had been doing an injustice to the people I'd learned it from. The guy was a good musician and lyricist, but he had a very narrow singing range. So he had indeed written the song with that dead melody. It was horrifying. It also explained why it hadn't spread very far before I started singing it. *faceplant* But it's not something I really worry about. If I was likely to run into the guy socially or he played gigs anywhere around here, I might, because the implications would be a lot more annoying to the guy. But given how many times I've heard people play songs to entirely different tunes (often for deep folk reasons like "I don't know how to play that tune, so I'm playing it to one I do know"), I'm fairly sure no harm was done. It's not like I'm going to record it or sing it for money, so he has no particular reason to care. But I did lay off singing my version, because I didn't have the heart for it anymore.)

In the church music community, people worry about this. Even if the original song is badly written, or if the composer has changed his mind about syncopation six times since 1981, choir directors insist on teaching the choir the exact version as written, in the latest version. It sounds really horrible if the congregation knows one version of the song and the choir insists on singing another, but seldom is this seen as a problem. (And the congregation doesn't ever seem to be briefed that the choir is singing a different sheet music version. Yet another thing to stop people singing.) I wonder if this is the lawsuit/music publishing influence, or the classical training.

Sure, sometimes the written version is better, and the congregation is dragging or the previous musicians taught them badly. But sometimes they're not. They may be adding ethnic musical features, or otherwise displaying long parish tradition.

(I wish the supposed "Catholic folk musicians" had gotten into collecting, cataloguing, and explaining stuff like variant hymn tunes and indigenous parish devotional songs, instead of what they did do. It would have been a lot more useful and interesting, and we probably would have been singing those pretty Lithuanian hymns in the seventies instead of guitar folk. But noooo.)

OK, here we go. I have the solfege of the tune. Unfortunately, they've been singing it unaccompanied for so long that the rhythm is all screwed up. Much like the way they sing "Tantum Ergo" to the tune of "St. Thomas" with the deadly long note at the end of every second measure (I'll never get that, ever. Would someone kindly explain that to me?), they seem to shift from 4/4 to 3/4 and back again with the greatest of ease.

I'll indicate what I think is eighth-note motion by placing a hyphen between the syllables and elipsis (. . .) after syllables that seem to be held longer. Otherwise, it's all quarter notes. Here we go:

do mi re mi fa mi re do . . . do-mi sol fa sol mi fa mi re / do mi re mi fa mi re do . . . do-mi sol fa sol mi mi fi sol . . . sol do ti la sol la . . . sol mi / mi fi sol do ti . . . la / (at this point I forget the rest)

Any clues?

It sure sounds like a popular "O salutaris" melody, with confused phrases from elsewhere - easy to happen when a group has only enough knowledge of hymnody so as to be "dangerous! Look at #71 in The Westminster Hymnal (it's the only hymnal I have with me at the moment).

CAPA20 WINS!!!!! Bless you, bless you, bless you!!!

And, as it turns out the dumb thing IS in two different time signatures! Wow!

Thanks to all for playing along.

i was stumped on that one. however, i know another hymn tune that begins with the same first line, just can't remember what it is. I am thinking maybe O Salutaris?

c-|e-d-e-f-|e-d-c
c-|e-d-e-g-|g-f#-g
g-|a-g-e-f-|g-(f-e)-d       =(two eight notes)
e-|c-d-e-f-|e-d-c

DUGUET

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)