My Grandfather's Clock

"Grandfather's Clock" is a song written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work, the author of "Marching Through Georgia". It is a standard of British brass bands and colliery bands, and is also popular in bluegrass music. It has also been sung by male choruses such as the Robert Shaw Chorale.

The opening bars of the tune are very similar to a motif used in the Allegro section of the 14th number (Andante-Adagio-Allegro) of Beethoven's Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus, opus 43.

The song, told from a grandson's point of view, is about his grandfather's grandfather clock.

The clock is purchased on the morning of his grandfather's birth and works perfectly for ninety years, requiring only that it be wound at the end of each week.

Yet the clock seems to eerily know the good and bad events in the grandfather's life – it rings 24 chimes when the grandfather brings his bride into his house, and near his death it rings an eerie alarm, which the family recognizes to mean that the grandfather is near death and gathers by his bed. After the grandfather dies, the clock suddenly stops, and never works again.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the song is responsible for the fact that a longcase clock is also called a "grandfather clock".

Work published a sequel to the song two years after, and again the grandson acts as the narrator.

The grandson laments the fate of the no-longer-functioning grandfather clock – it was sold to a junk dealer, who sold its parts for scrap and its case for kindling. In the grandfather's house, the clock was replaced by a wall clock, which the grandson disdains (referring to it as "that vain, stuck-up thing on the wall").

However, the sequel never reached the popularity of the original.

"My Grandfather's Clock" was often played in Britain on Children's Favourites and during that period was recorded by the Radio Revellers. In the United States, a version, without the last stanza of lyrics, was on an extended-play 45 rpm record on the Peter Pan label (the other song on that side was The Syncopated Clock, and the flip side had The Arkansas Traveler and Red River Valley). Johnny Cash covered the song on his 1959 album Songs of Our Soil. Evelyn Knight recorded the song for Decca Records. Also in 1959, it was included on The Four Lads' album, Swing Along. Other versions became popular in other countries; it is well known to many generations in Japan, with a cover by singer Ken Hirai becoming massively popular in 2002.

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Wikipedia