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Some may wonder how the the anthem, For the Right to Life, (and website) originated. First, let me say I have no musical background, so I can’t take any credit for the melody. Nor do I have a clue about web design, music recording and editing, I can only take credit for creating the lyrics to the anthem. (Quite honestly, I have to give the Holy Spirit any credit for the success of this project. I have no other logical explanation.)
How I married my lyrics to an old pioneer hymn melody bears telling…
It all started in about 2010 when I first listened to a moving choral piece on a Christian hymn anthology cassette tape I had found at a Raleigh, NC thrift store. Among the ten or twelve hymns on this tape (which included renditions of “Amazing Grace,” “In the Garden,” and some other popular Christian hymns) was one entitled Bound for the Promised Land performed by the Salvation Army Band and Chorus.
I later learned that this arrangement was Mack Wilberg’s. Wilberg is the music director/arranger/conductor for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. To my ears the melody seemed more fitting for an anthem than any kind of “hymn.” An anthem to what, I wasn’t sure, but the idea stayed in the back of my mind.
At the time I had been very involved in pro-life activism in North Carolina (where I lived and worked) such as participating in an annual March for Life in downtown Raleigh every January sponsored by NC Right to Life, and then a week later traveling with a busload of other local pro-lifers to participate in the big annual Right to Life March held in Washington, DC. It later struck me that, unlike many other successful movements and causes, the Right-to-Life movement did not seem to have an official theme song or anthem.
As a student of history I knew that theme songs and anthems often played no small part in rallying people around this or that cause or movement. For example, The Internationale helped boost morale in the organized labor movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. La Marseillaise has served as the national anthem of France since 1795. Our own American Civil War saw the debut of many stirring songs (both North and South) such as Battle Cry of Freedom, When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, and Bonnie Blue Flag. Even the civil rights struggle of the 1960’s had its theme song, We Shall Overcome. And of course, what university sports program worth its salt does not have a rousing “fight song” to get the students, fans and alumni to their feet after a touchdown at the football game? On-ward to vic-tow-ree RAH-RAH-RAH! National anthems serve the same purpose as a means to inspire the allegiance of that country’s citizens.
I didn’t have to spend a lot of time wondering if there existed a moving melody somewhere that might serve as the music for a pro-life anthem. It was then I dug out the cassette containing Bound for the Promised Land and listened to it again to see if the melody could be adapted to use as the basis for an anthem. So, over the course of the next week I sat down and wrote lyrics that eventually become For the Right to Life using the melody to that old American hymn.
Over the course of the next couple of years I made some feeble efforts to interest someone to pick up the ball and run with it and actually produce a recorded version of my anthem using the melody from Bound for the Promised Land, but no takers. After retiring in late 2012, I moved back to Michigan with my wife. In 2017 I made a couple more attempts to drum up interest in recording the anthem, but it wasn’t until the following year I was able to make the right connections able to turn my dream of a rousing anthem for the pro-life movement into a reality.
The man who finally “picked up the ball” (and with no little enthusiasm), was a local guy I’d only recently come to know, Joseph M. Nofs. It was over coffee at a local Tim Horton’s on a warm August afternoon in 2018 that I broached the question to him as to whether there was some way we might turn the lyrics I’d written to For the Right to Life into a musical Youtube video. Little had I realized when our discussion began that Joseph was able to bring to the table his extensive experience in website development, marketing and promotion, and related skills, all of which would be called upon when we would later begin to build the Guard Life Now website and seek to make it a kind of pro-life music hub on the worldwide web. If that weren’t enough it also became clear to me that Joseph’s commitment to the pro-life cause was every bit as deep as my own (as well has his enthusiasm for this particular venture).
Dennis Gerard Embo is the author of a spiritual memoir, The God That Prevailed (iUniverse, 2005). In 2012 he retired to Fort Gratiot, MI where he makes his home with his wife.
