Circle of Days Songbook: The Nields (Nields Songbooks)

Hello, guitar player!

Welcome to Circle of Days, the twenty-first Nields album. Conceived as a kind of homage to an imagined pagan calendar, the album is a collection of songs that might or might not correspond to certain major or minor, real or imagined, holy days asleep in the calendar.

When we first started making these little songbooks back in 1995, we used as our model the extremely popular Rise Up Singing songbooks created by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood. I was given my first copy in 1990, and that book is tattered and marked up so thoroughly that I had to get a second and then a third copy. In 2016, we received the great honor of being asked by Annie and Peter if they could put two of our songs (“Creek’s Gonna Rise” and “Your House Is Strong”) into their sequel, Rise Again. Like those books, this one assumes that you know the tune well enough to sing it against the words and the chords we’re providing for you here. It also assumed your knowledge of basic song structure: the verse chords will be identical for each verse, so we don’t repeat them unless there’s an anomaly. This is all to encourage you to listen to the recording.

And for listening, for learning, for witnessing, we thank you. The Nields