"Day by Day"

Stephen Schwartz .. and then some!

Sometimes a Song tells a very old story, and such is the case with ours for this week, “Day by Day,” from the musical Godspell, which took the world by storm in the early 1970’s at the height of the hippie movement. Everyone was aware of that movement, which had as its focus love, though largely separated from the ties that bind people together in a more ordered and intentional sense. The idea that being free meant being entirely autonomous was not entirely new in the world, of course, but it caught on with disillusioned young people who thought that they could reinvent the world and, in fact, save it, simply by throwing out the structures established by religion and letting everyone “do their own thing.” Sprinkle a little fairy dust on this idea, and you get the Garden of Eden without the God who created it. And that IS a very old story and the source, still, of all our woes.

Every movement has some pushback, and for the hippie movement that pushback was an offshoot that forged a different path in an effort to keep the idealism of the hippie movement, but restore it to a very old order, modeled after the the time when Jesus was among us and first calling to himself disciples. Some consider the Jesus People movement to be the great religious revival of the second-half of the 20th century because it brought back to the Christian faith such great numbers of young people who had turned away from the faith of their ancestors. It’s hard to disparage that achievement.

So it happens that our song today, from the off-Broadway hit show, Godspell, was written during this era of the Jesus People, by John-Michael Tebelak, as a Master’s thesis project, when Tebelak was a student of drama at Carnegie Mellon University. Tebelak’s religious background was Anglican, and his work on Godspell was certainly influenced in part by hymns from the 1940 Hymnal as well as by the Gospels. In particular, Tebelak based his story on the parables of Jesus as related by Matthew’s Gospel, around which he created a structure for the play. The musical’s composer and primary lyricist, then Carnegie drama student, Stephen Schwartz, later produced the show for its off-Broadway opening in 1972. Schwartz wrote all of the music for Godspell; some of the his lyrics are original to the show, while others are adapted from either the Bible or the 1940 Hymnal. And, in fact, our song for today is Schwartz’s resetting of a hymn of the same name, “Day by Day,” already set to a traditional hymn tune (Chichester) from the original prayer by the 13th-century Benedictine Bishop, Richard of Chichester, England. Here is the Bishop’s prayer:

Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits thou hast given me,
for all the pains and insults thou hast borne for me.
O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother,
may I know thee more clearly,
love thee more dearly,
and follow thee more nearly, day by day.
Amen.

The original production of Godspell won a Stephen Schwartz a Grammy Award in 1972 for Best Original Score for a Cast Album. Some of our readers will know him from his musical, Pippin, which took four Tony awards in 1973. Godspell, Pippin, and another of his plays, The Magic Show, earned Schwartz the distinction of being the only producer to have three concurrently-running plays — when he was only 26 years old. His career continued well into the 21st century.

As for our song, “Day by Day” hit the charts running in 1972, appearing on the Billboard Top 10, the Top 100, and Easy Listening, and it also charted high in the UK and Australia that year. It’s been recorded commercially over 90 times since 1972, as recently as 2020, and is now considered a gospel classic. It finally did win a Grammy for “Best Gospel Song” — in 2005 — and it’s still a singable folktune today.

I hope you enjoy this original cast recording from 1972, featuring lead singer Robin Lamont.

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well as a Friday podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber and please do share our posts.