In his Music of Christian Hymns, Erik Routley says: “Carter emerged in the 1960s as a new kind of folksinger who successfully built a bridge between the ‘folk underground’ and that orthodox society with which it was at odds. Most of his tunes are true folk music in that you feel that they were there before he discovered them. They cannot be sung  to any words but his own, so they are not true hymn tunes, but they have just that of innocent originality that makes some of them authentic folk music; perhaps the most gracious of them is EVERY STAR.”

Sydney Bertram Carter was born May 6, 1915, at Camden Town, London, and studied at Balliol College, Oxford. After a time as a schoolmaster, he served during World War II with the Friends Ambulance Unit in the Middle East and Greece. He has taught and lectured for the British Council in Norway, Spain, Poland, and Germany. In radio and television work, he has done a large volume of writing scripts for the British Broadcasting Company, including serials teaching foreign languages.

It was his dissatisfaction with the unchangeable formality of church services that led him to start writing sacred texts and tunes for informal gatherings of people. Many of his songs were critical of the established church and protested what he felt was a lack of awareness of what was going on in the real world. Even though he wrote most of them as temporary throwaway music, their quality has found for many of them a place in hymnals around the world. A number of collections have been published, including Green Print for Song, 1963; Nine Songs or Ballads, 1964; Ten New Songs; Nothing Fixed or Final;  and Sydney Carter in the Present Tense, 1969. Donald Swann and James Minchin are among several musicians who have harmonized Carter’s tunes; he does not do that himself.