Conscience and Decency Defined by the Hollies - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother - meanspeed=76 bpm

These are charts of the song at the speed of grace called He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother, by the performers: The Hollies.

Thefreedictionary.com, defines of grace as - noun, #4-“A dispency to be generous or helpful; goodwill. Our brothers and sisters at Mirriam’s online, 2d, : “disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency. Roget’s offers us charitableness, benevolence, altruism, decency, or , my favorite, 2: A sense of propriety, rightness, as conscience and decency.
The title, according to songfacts.com, came from the motto for Boys Town, a community formed in 1917 by a catholic Priest named Father Edward Flanagan. Located in Omaha, Nebraska, it was a place where troubled or homeless boys could come for help. It is now the motto of Girls and Boys Town that “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”—a motto of the camp asked on a phrase that appeared in The Messenger magazine in 1941, wherein a boy was shown carrying a crippled boy on his back, and when asked, “Isn’t that heavy?” the reply was “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother,” which is a phrase Flanagan so thought captured the spirit of the camp that he had a statue made of the scene, and made the phrase the Camp’s motto. Songfacts.com is amazing, so I can’t help passing on that in 1938 Spencer Tracey portrayed father Flanagan in the movie starring Ava Gardner’s ex-husband, Mickey Rooney. And of course Elton John played piano. Unlike the songs we see in the Bittersweet category, most online comments about this song are about love and inspiration, and how this song soothed the sickness or despair of a situation. And all that time: I thought the performance was about the singer’s own brother
I always thought that the singer hit’s the Bb going back into the 2d verse so well, with such a tiny bit of hesitation, that he pulls off what could otherwise be an over the top sickly-sweet song. This is just one of those songs that many people are opinionated about. Personally, I have two fantastic brothers and cousins I think of as brothers and I always think when this song is on Musk or Wendy’s or whatever, of the brotherly sacrifice bit. I try not to cross that Robert Blythe line of questionable gender-itude, and we all love our sisters too!
As you can see from the graph, there are some major “episodes” here, but from start to finish this is a song recorded live, of course, and has an acceleration of around 2 percent, when all quarter notes are averaged. Like the other songs I am bringing out in this category, there is a ying-yang element in play, as far as the mean and median and average speeds being securely in an area where expressions are genuinely confident and positive and loving, and such is show with some measures slowing as far as 67 bpms, and much of the song an almost life and death sincerity at around 76 bpms, with some of the song tearing at (at least the performer’s—how you react to this is a personal matter and varies with everyone) loneliness, with a considerable portion of the song played in what I call the category of Lonely. All said, the Hegelian duality thus described in concert with the songs words.
The mean-speed, or the speed of the song expressed as beats per minute on this live recording= 76.0 beats per minute.
The mean-space, or time between each beat= 790 milliseconds.
The mean-beat on the recording = 1.267 beats per second.
The mean-frequency, or the speed of the song expressed as cycles per second= 1.267 Hertz .
The mean-tone= 324.27 Hertz, located 29 cents above D#4/Eb4= 311.127 Hertz and 71 cents below E4= 329.628 Hertz , For more on tone frequency, sound vibration and their correspondence to beats per minute, see Stephen Jay's The Theory of Harmonic Rhythm, linked with Stephen's kind permission on meanspeed.com.
The graph is based on a spreadsheet generated with this method:
a) I calibrated groups of every single measure (four quarter-notes) ten times with Seiko
b) Ten trials were averaged, coordinated and synthesized.
I the created the speed graph in Microsoft's Excel for MacIntosh 2004 on an Apple iBook G4 as hardware.


Liam Silverman
Meanspeed Music Company
July 21, 2007