Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens

Last night I dreamed that I was hearing a "spidery" (slow, high-pitched, ethereal) performance of the Monkees song "Listen to the Band." I awoke with a vague sense that the lyrics had been in Latin but couldn't remember any of them.

In the morning, I said my Rosary, and the Salve Regina brought the dream back to my memory. After all, what is Salve, . . . Mater misericordiae but a Latin translation of "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman"? Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevae -- "To thee do we cry, Eve's exiled children" -- what are we asking but that she "listen to the banned"? Of course the problem is that we are so intent on being listened to that we forget to listen: "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman plays the song and no one listens."

After the Rosary, I attended a sacrament meeting at the tiny English-speaking branch in Taichung -- the first time I have set foot in a Mormon church in well over a decade and probably closer to two. The CJCLDS has changed a lot in that time, but the sacrament meeting experience is just exactly the same as ever -- including, yes, its characteristic boringness, but not only that. I appreciated the total silence at some points in the service -- a commodity in short supply in Taiwan. I found myself thinking of it as "Quakerish," though I know Quakerism only through books.

Mormons don't do anything remotely like a liturgical calendar -- they don't even go to church on Christmas Day unless it happens to fall on a Sunday -- but one concession to the season is that Christmas carols are sung instead of ordinary hymns. Today, one of the selections happened to feature the only Latin in the Mormon hymnal: "Angels We Have Heard on High," with the Latin refrain Gloria in exclesis Deo. I thought it was funny: Earlier this year, I had tried and failed to find a Latin Mass in Taiwan, and then the one day I decide to go to a Mormon church instead, they have Latin!

Then I realized -- how had I not noticed it before? -- that "Angels We Have Heard on High" has pretty much the same tune as "Listen to the Band." Transpose "Angels" into G major (Mormons sing it in F major), map two measures of "Angels" to each measure of "Listen," and they fit almost perfectly. I don't have the musical talent to do it properly myself, but someone ought to. You can listen to a quick and dirty proof of concept here.

There's a certain thematic overlap, too: "Angels we have heard" -- "Listen to the band" -- the angel band. You could introduce the combined songs with that Negro spiritual about "ten little angels in de band."

I guess YouTube knows it's Christmastime, too. This evening the algorithm served up Denmark + Winter's version of "Little Drummer Boy." That syncs with "Listen to the Band," too. "Shall I play for you, pa-rum-pa-pum-pum, on my drum? Mary nodded. . . ." -- "Hey, hey, Mercy Woman . . . play the drum a little bit louder."