Home Sweet Home | |
'Home Sweet Home'; sung at western-style weddings in JapanA Christian religious service seems incomplete without a hymn, and weddings are no exception. This page is about one such hymn. Well actually, it's not really a hymn, it's a secular song. It's a song about the value of a good home. It's a story about somebody going away from home, roaming around, and then going back home to get a soothing caress from mum and a fond smile from dad. It could be about somebody leaving home to get married, the marriage not working, and the child running back home where they know they'll be OK. Not a suitable wedding song! In fact the co-authors of the song had pretty poor home lives, so it's likely that they wrote this as a dream of what a home should be. Hugely popular in nineteenth century America, then England, and was later one of the western imports when Japan opened its doors to the rest of the world. Japanese words were written, with a religious, home-making theme, and it became one of several hymns sung at a western-style weddings in Japan |
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