1
My grandmother's choir has sung the same closing hymn at every memorial in our parish for forty years, and last spring they decided to record it. Mrs. Adeyemi, who had sung the low harmony line since before I was born, had died in February, and the choir wanted something to give her family.
2
I was brought in because I owned a laptop and a microphone, which in Ferndale counts as a recording studio. We set up in the church hall on a Tuesday. The hall is free on Tuesdays because the badminton club folded, and it is a poor room for singing: a suspended ceiling that takes the top off everything, a floor painted for a game nobody plays there any more, and a kitchen hatch that rattles at anything below a low G. I taped the hatch and moved the boom twice before I found a position where the ceiling stopped putting an edge on the upper parts. Fourteen singers, one microphone on a boom, and a radiator that clanked so loudly we had to unplug it and sing in coats.
3
They needed nine takes. On the ninth, everything held together until the sixth bar, where Mr. Oyelaran came in a full beat early on the word rest — early enough that you hear his voice alone for a moment before the others arrive. The sixth bar is where the hymn thins out: the upper parts hold one chord across it and the low line moves underneath on its own, so a voice arriving early there has nothing over it to hide under. On the recording it is about three-quarters of a second of one man in an empty-sounding hall. Then the harmony closed around him and the take carried through to the end, the best of the nine by a distance.
4
I told them I could fix it. I had takes four and seven; I could lift six bars from one of them and nobody would ever know. I was rather pleased with myself for knowing this.
5
Nobody answered for a moment. Then Mr. Oyelaran said, "That is how Nkem sang it."
6
He explained it as though it were obvious, which to everyone over sixty in the room it was. Mrs. Adeyemi had always come in early on that word. Not by accident — she had learned the hymn in a different parish, where the line was set a beat ahead, and she had never changed it. She had come to Ferndale in 1978 and was in the choir inside a month, and she stood at the end of the back row for forty-one years, next to the door, because she was the one who let the latecomers in. For forty years the choir had absorbed the early entry as a feature of the hymn, and half of them, Mr. Oyelaran included, could no longer sing it any other way without concentrating.
7
So I had recorded fourteen people singing a hymn correctly, except that the correct version was not the one they knew.
8
That should have decided it, and for about ten minutes it did. Then Grandma raised the objection nobody wanted. The recording was for Nkem's family — her daughter in Lagos, her grandchildren, none of whom had ever heard the Ferndale choir. They would put it on and hear a wrong note in the sixth bar. They would not hear a tribute. They would hear an amateur choir making a mistake at the exact moment the hymn mattered most.
9
Nobody had an answer to that either. The early entry meant something only if you knew what it meant, and the people it was made for were the people least likely to know.
10
We argued for an hour. Two singers thought I should splice it. Mr. Oyelaran said he would not sing it again correctly and could not be made to. Somebody suggested recording a tenth take and letting me choose, which solved nothing and everyone knew it.
11
What we did in the end was neither fix it nor leave it alone. Before the hymn, Grandma recorded eleven seconds of speech: her name, Nkem Adeyemi, the parish she learned the hymn in, and one sentence about the sixth bar. Then the ninth take, uncut.
12
Eleven seconds took four attempts. The first two Grandma delivered as though she were reading a notice at the end of a service, and Mr. Oyelaran, who had not spoken for twenty minutes, told her to say it to the daughter and not to the room. I left the microphone where it had stood for the singing, and the coats where they had been dropped across the chairs, because a voice recorded in a bare hall and a hymn recorded in a full one do not sound like the same afternoon, and the join between them would have announced itself before anybody reached the sixth bar.
13
I have listened to it more times than I can defend. The eleven seconds are not elegant. Grandma stumbles on Ferndale and starts the word twice. I offered to re-record them and she declined, which I understand better now than I did then.
14
The thing I keep returning to is that we did not resolve the disagreement. We built something that carried the explanation alongside the flaw, so that the flaw stopped being one, and we accepted that this would work for some listeners and not others. Nkem's daughter wrote in June. She said she had not known about the other parish. She said her mother had never mentioned it.
15
So the recording told her something the hymn alone could not have, and something Mrs. Adeyemi herself had apparently chosen not to say. I do not know what to do with that. I have stopped trying to decide whether keeping the note was right. I only know that fixing it would have made the recording easier to listen to and would have removed the only part of it that was hers.