As he tells the story, in 1971 composer Gavin Bryars was fooling around with a tape loop of an old tramp singing a fragment of a hymn, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet.”
When I copied the loop onto the continuous reel in Leicester, I left the door of the recording studio open (it opened onto one of the large painting studios) while I went downstairs to get a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual, and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping.
Later he wrote a quietly evolving instrumental accompaniment for the loop. The original 1975 version was tailored to fit one side of an LP and was about 25 minutes long. In 1993 Bryars reworked it for CD, resulting in a 74-minute version. For this recording he also added the voice of Tom Waits. The above is an excerpt from it.
I’ve always wondered about those people who were quietly weeping: where are they now?
(Quotation from the liner notes of the 1993 version.)
Pre-TypePad
Light On Dark Water 
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