Every lodge has that moment during the festive board when someone suggests a song and the room goes quiet. We’ve lost the habit. A hundred years ago, no Masonic evening was complete without at least two or three songs — proper songs, with words that meant something, not just “Auld Lang Syne” mumbled at half-past ten.
Here are five that deserve better than the dusty songbook shelf they’re sitting on.
1. “The Entered Apprentice’s Song” — Matthew Birkhead (1723)
Come let us prepare,
We Brothers that are
Assembled on merry Occasion;
Let’s drink, laugh, and sing,
Our Wine has a Spring,
Here’s a Health to an Accepted Mason.
This is the oldest known Masonic song in English, first published in James Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723. Birkhead was an actor and singer at Drury Lane, and his tune was designed to be belted out around a table, not whispered reverently. It ran to several verses covering all three degrees, and for the best part of a century it was sung at virtually every lodge meeting in England.
It fell away gradually through the Victorian period, when lodges began taking themselves rather more seriously and singing felt a bit too convivial for the new tone. A shame, because convivial is exactly what the festive board should be.
Worth reviving? Absolutely. The chorus is easy to learn, the tune is simple, and it belongs right after the Worshipful Master’s toast. Print the words on the menu card and you’ll have the room singing by the second verse.
2. “Farewell to the Brethren of St James’s Lodge, Tarbolton” — Robert Burns (1786)
Adieu! a heart-warm fond adieu;
Dear brothers of the Mystic Tie!
Ye favour’d, ye enlighten’d few,
Companions of my social joy!
Burns wrote this as he prepared to emigrate to Jamaica — a journey he never made, as it turned out, because Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect sold well enough to keep him in Ayrshire. The poem is genuinely moving: a man saying goodbye to the brothers who meant most to him, uncertain whether he’d ever see them again.
Scottish lodges kept this alive longer than most, but even north of the border it’s rarely heard now. The language is accessible — Burns at his plainest — and the sentiment is universal. Any brother who’s relocated and left his lodge behind will feel it in his chest.
Worth reviving? Without question, especially at a leaving or retirement supper. If your lodge has a Scotsman, you’ve got your reader. If it doesn’t, the words carry themselves.
3. “The Level and the Square” — Robert Morris (c. 1854)
We meet upon the Level and we part upon the Square,
What words of precious meaning those words Masonic are;
Come let us contemplate them, they are worthy of a thought,
With the highest and the deepest and the noblest they are fraught.
Robert Morris was an American Mason from Kentucky — poet, educator, and founder of the Order of the Eastern Star. “The Level and the Square” became one of the most widely recited Masonic poems of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. It was frequently set to music, though no single melody ever became definitive, and different provinces adopted different tunes.
It faded partly because it’s long (eight stanzas in the full version) and partly because its earnest Victorian tone felt increasingly out of step with twentieth-century tastes. But the central image — meeting on the level, parting on the square — remains the single most recognisable phrase in Freemasonry outside the ritual itself.
Worth reviving? Yes, but selectively. Pick the first and last stanzas. It works beautifully as a closing piece, read aloud just before the Tyler’s Toast. The full version is too much for a modern audience, but the edited version has real weight.
4. “The Tyler’s Toast” (Traditional, set to music, 18th century)
To all poor and distressed Masons,
Wherever dispersed over the face of Earth and Water,
Wishing them a speedy relief from all their sufferings,
And a safe return to their native country, if they so desire.
Every Mason knows the Tyler’s Toast, but fewer know that it was once routinely sung rather than spoken. Several eighteenth-century lodge minute books record it as a musical item, with the Tyler or a designated singer performing it to a melody that varied by region. In some Irish lodges, it was set to the air of “The Rakes of Mallow.” In parts of northern England, a slower, more hymn-like setting was preferred.
The sung version disappeared because the toast itself became formalised — standardised wording, standardised delivery, no room for variation. But there’s something genuinely affecting about hearing those words sung rather than recited. It changes the register entirely, from obligation to prayer.
Worth reviving? This is the one I’d most like to hear again. Find a brother with a decent voice, agree a simple melody, and let him sing it unaccompanied at the end of the evening. You won’t forget it.
5. “Brother, Tell Me of Thy Name” — Traditional Irish (c. 1800s)
Brother, tell me of thy name,
Whence you came, and what’s thy claim?
For the night is dark and cold,
And the lodge is shut and old.
This one is harder to pin down. It appears in several nineteenth-century Irish Masonic collections, sometimes under different titles, and it seems to have been used as a call-and-response piece at the door — the Tyler challenging and the candidate (or visiting brother) answering in verse. The melody was probably borrowed from an existing folk tune, as was common practice.
It fell out of use when the ritual became more tightly regulated and there was less room for local flourishes. Irish Freemasonry had a rich tradition of incorporating music into the ceremony itself, not just the festive board, and much of that tradition was lost during the twentieth century as lodges followed the English model more closely.
Worth reviving? It would take some confidence, but as a novelty piece at a lodge of instruction or a Burns Night supper, it would be a genuine talking point. The call-and-response format is engaging, and the words remind us that the Tyler’s role was once more theatrical than administrative.
Bring the songbook back
None of these songs require professional musicians. They need a willing voice, a printed sheet, and a room that’s had enough wine to join in. That’s it. Our predecessors understood that singing together builds fellowship in a way that speeches and toasts alone cannot. The vibration of shared song — even badly sung — does something to a room that nothing else replicates.
If your lodge has a musical brother gathering dust on the sidelines, give him a job. If your Festive Board has become predictable, introduce one song per quarter and see what happens. These five are all in the public domain. They cost nothing. They ask only that we remember what our forebears already knew: that a lodge which sings together, stays together.
Related reading: Confessions of a Lodge Mentor · The Widow's Son: A Poem for the Third Degree