Original 'Poor Wayfaring Man' had different tune

By Tad Walch, Deseret News

Published: Saturday, Oct. 11 2008 12:05 a.m. MDT

Summary

John Taylor used a more upbeat tune when he sang \"A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief\" to Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail.

PROVO, Utah — New research has recovered the more upbeat tune John Taylor

used when he sang "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" to Joseph Smith just before

the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was murdered on

June 27, 1844.

The tune had been lost to history. For 140 years, church members have

sung the song to a different tune, one commissioned by Taylor

himself.A year before President Taylor died in 1887, he sang the song for

composer Ebenezer Beesley the way he sang it at Carthage jail in Illinois before

a mob stormed the jail and shot and killed Smith and his brother Hyrum and

wounded Taylor and Willard Richards.Beesley recorded the tune in his choir book. Then he composed a

different one for the song for a new hymn book commissioned for the church by

Taylor, and Beesley's arrangement is the only one known to generations of

Latter-day Saints.A Taylor descendant recently uncovered the Beesley choir book, and

historian Jeffrey N. Walker presented his arrangement of the song at a church history symposium on Taylor held

Friday at Brigham Young University.

A quartet that included Walker's son performed the song at the

conference. Taylor's tune wouldn't be completely unfamiliar to Latter-day

Saints, but it is more upbeat and some notes have a distinct Irish-Celtic

sound."We heard a hymn that changed us a bit," Walker said after the

performance, "that transported us back to a day in Carthage, amongst the leaders

of the church as they contemplated the role that the church would have through

the world, and while that day (the mob) may have taken two of the greatest who

have ever lived, John was there (as) more than just a recorder, he was there to

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