Simple Gifts

The story

"Simple Gifts" is a Shaker song written and composed in 1848, generally attributed to Elder Joseph Brackett (1797–1882) of the Shakers of Maine. Which community he belonged to when he wrote it is disputed. Brackett lived at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester before he was called to serve in the Ministry in 1848; for the next decade he served the community at Alfred, and later returned to New Gloucester. The history of the Alfred community mentions Elder Joseph several times but never the song. The first known reference to it is an advertisement for a concert given in October 1848 by the Shaker Family of the Society of Shakers of New Gloucester, Maine.

Several Shaker manuscripts call "Simple Gifts" a "dancing song" or a "quick dance". "Turning" is a common theme of Christian theology, but the turning in its last two lines has also been read as directions for the dance: when the dance is done properly, each dancer ends where they began. A manuscript by Mary Hazzard of the Shaker community at New Lebanon, New York, records the original melody, which slightly resembles repetitions of the opening bars of William Byrd's "The Barley Break"; a somewhat similar theme occurs in Giovanni Gabrieli's Canzon per sonare no. 2.

Outside the Shaker communities the song was hardly known until Aaron Copland used its melody in his score for Martha Graham's ballet Appalachian Spring, first performed in 1944. (The Shakers had once worshipped on Holy Mount, in the Massachusetts part of the Appalachians.) Copland set it a second time in 1950, with Brackett's original verse as its words, in the first set of his Old American Songs for voice and piano, which was later orchestrated. Three later verses, not of Shaker origin, are also sung.

In 1963 the English songwriter Sydney Carter adapted the tune and words for his hymn "Lord of the Dance", also known as "I Danced in the Morning". In 1996 Ronan Hardiman adapted Carter's hymn, without permission or acknowledgement, for Michael Flatley's dance show Lord of the Dance, which has led some to believe the song Celtic, though it is American and English in origin.

The tune has been arranged and quoted widely since: by Judy Collins (1970), John P. Zdechlik (1972), Yo-Yo Ma with Alison Krauss (2001), Weezer (2008) and Scooter (2009). An instrumental version was played as the Olympic flag entered the stadium at the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and John Williams wrote Air and Simple Gifts for Barack Obama's inauguration on 20 January 2009, played by Anthony McGill, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma and Gabriela Montero. For many years an excerpt opened the CBS Reports documentaries, and in June 2026 CBS News named it one of the 250 essential American songs of the past 250 years.

What it says

A Shaker song in praise of a simple, free and humble life, which it calls a gift that brings a person down to the place where they ought to be, a valley of love and delight. Its closing lines, on bowing, bending and turning until one comes round right, are at once a figure of the soul's turning and the steps of the Shakers' worship dance. The mood is light and joyful.

The words