Randy Dunson: Historian at heart

Randy Dunson has always been a historian at heart, particularly interested in the history of the railroad. He's spent hundreds of hours researching thousands of historic railroad documents and was a primary source for the "Train Town" article that was included in "Clovis New Mexico: The First 100 Years" published in 2007.

But in recent years, a more unique type of history has captured the Portales man's interest - the history of hymns.

"When new church music started coming along 20 or 30 years ago, there was a lot of bickering about that, so I started researching some hymns," Dunson said.

He said when modern praise and worship music started coming about, it was difficult for older generations in the church to accept. Dunson said he became inspired to research the history of hymns as a means to illustrate that new music being controversial was nothing new at all.

"All music was controversial when it was new," he said. "It was just bringing people in and saying, 'Hey, we aren't the only people to go through this (adjustment period), and we can get used to this.'"

Dunson said he would share the history of a hymn off and on at his church during the praise and worship portion of the service.

"The worship style we had was to introduce a song and share the history of it, and from there, it's just grown," he said.

Dunson, who now has an extensive collection of old hymnals and books on the history of hymns, said the information he began to find only drew him further into making this historic research a hobby.

"What's fascinating about hymns is how much they influence our theology," Dunson said. "You can look through the Bible and find many things that you would also come across in a hymnal. You can find numerous (biblical) passages that are in one hymn, or you find a hymn that uses one passage and emphasizes on it greatly."

Dunson said another interesting fact about hymns is that before the late 1800s, most lyrics were written before their tunes; and the tunes for various hymns have changed over time.

"Years ago, there were churches that might only know 10 or 12 tunes, but they had a book with 1,000 hymns in it. If you look at those old hymns, it would tell you what the meter is for that hymn (how many syllables are in a line), and they would pick a tune that would fit that meter," Dunson said. "If you look at any hymn, the words were composed at a different date than the tune, and they were composed by different people."

Many old hymns were inspired by tragedy, such as "It is Well With My Soul," written by Horatio Spafford in 1873 after his four daughters were killed in a ship accident.

"Those are the ones a lot of people have related to during all of this (pandemic)," Dunson said.

The past few years, Dunson has begun to share his historic hymn facts on his Facebook page. He said he has gotten a lot of positive responses to the information.

"In the last five years, there has been so much bickering and fighting and being mean to each other, and I thought, we can do better than this," Dunson said of his inspiration to share his history lessons online. "It's so easy to get drawn into the squabbles, and I didn't want to do that, so I thought, 'Let's put something positive on there.' It's brought back a lot of memories, and it gives people who have known these hymns most of their lives new information."

Friend and fellow church member Judy Terry said she often shares Dunson's Facebook posts about the history of hymns. "I just enjoy the history," she said.

"I think it's a very good way to acquaint people with hymns. It's very interesting, and I thought some of my friends would enjoy it."