I heard a stirring version of “For Those Tears I Died” at Sunnyside SDA church today and decided to follow up on it. This morning’s female vocalist, accompanied by a pianist, sang so beautifully I could have been in tears. The tune was enormously popular in Christian circles in the 1970s, so much so that certain historians of Gospel Music have asserted the song, and the album upon which it first appeared, Come to the Water by Children of the Day, launched the Christian Contemporary genre.
I liked the ditty in the 70s because it sounded like a pop tune. Then, for some reason, the song was no longer heard after 1980 or so. I assumed this was because it was a bit on the melodramatic side and that times and fashions of Christian music had changed.
Little did I know the reason for the song’s banishment was because of evangelical intolerance once the author had come out of the closet. Below is a 1971 video clip of Marsha Stevens-Pino and her gospel quartet, Children of the Day, singing “For Those Tears I Died,” a song she’d written shortly after becoming a Christian in 1969. Stevens married one of the men in Children of the Day and had two children with him, but in 1979, they divorced and she announced that she was a lesbian. To this day, Stevens-Pino continues Christian ministry via her label, Born Again Lesbian Music (BALM). Shamefully, many conservative Christians continue to reject Stevens-Pino because of her sexual orientation. An attempt at partial rapprochement onstage with the Gaither singers in 2002 where Stevens-Pino sang her most famous song with the assembled conclave resulted in a sweet moment (around 3:10 and thereafter), but was subsequently marred by expressions of prejudice and criticisms directed at the Gaithers and Stevens-Pino.
Marsha Stevens-Pino Wikipedia page
And here’s a moving rendition by Pat Boone, who was seemingly created for the purpose of singing this tune.
