Voices-only Wednesday: Mountaintop ‘Magnifcat’

Welcome to Voices-only Wednesday, when we search high and low to bring you great a cappella videos.

This one comes from up high — 2,464 feet, to be exact — at the top of Mount Scott in southwestern Oklahoma. (Yes, our readers in Colorado and, y’know, Nepal, will scoff at that number, but for Oklahoma that’s pretty high.)

Atop Mount Scott. (PHOTO BY ERIK TRYGGESTAD)

I journeyed to the top of Mount Scott (by car … there’s a parking lot up there) to listen to personal stories and share devotional time with participants in the Rural America Ministries program. The students, from schools including Oklahoma State University, Ohio Valley University and Lubbock Christian University, had just completed 30-day ministry experiences in small, rural towns including Cordell and Mangum, both in Oklahoma, and Seymour, Texas. It was great to see Seymour Church of Christ minister Lee Skelton. I hadn’t talked to him since he and his wife served as missionaries in Transylvania (no joke) Romania.

At the end of our time on Mount Scott (and before driving to nearby Meers for some incredible cheeseburgers) we sang “Magnificat (Mary’s Song).” Usually I try to stay quiet when I film folks singing, but I wasn’t hearing a lot of tenor so I jumped in, trying not to overpower the recording by virtue of my proximity to the microphone.

Read our feature on Rural America Ministries (RAM), and learn how they helped a small, dying church in Carnegie, Okla., find new life. (I’ve already gotten some great feedback on that piece, by the way. I particularly love how the church found a way to grow by using the people they already had in the pews. It’s a real “five loaves, two fish” story.)

The ‘Magnificat’ is taken from Luke 1:46-55. It’s a song of Mary after she learns that she has been chosen to bring the Messiah into the world.

I looked around for other a cappella versions, and found this one by Zoe Group, off their “In Christ Alone” album.

And if you want to go really old school, here’s an a cappella rendition of the Magnificat from the late 1500s by Italian composer Giovanni Gabrieli.

Yes, I also found a Spanish-language version of the contemporary Magnificat, but it’s got a lot of annoying beat-boxing and some severe tempo issues. It’s here if you want to give it a listen, but be ye warned! (Maybe our friend Zuriel Rubio could produce one of his excellent Spanish-language videos of this song for us.)