Simon & Garfunkel's "Go Tell It on the Mountain"

During the last six weeks of 2014, I listened to Simon & Garfunkel's Wednesday Morning, 3 AM every Wednesday.  The album includes "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and since I was listening to this during Christmastime and heard "Go Tell It on the Mountain" in church, I started comparing the two versions.  According to the liner notes in Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, Simon & Garfunkel arranged their own version, and according to my hymnal (The Lutheran Service Book), the other version of "Go Tell It on the Mountain" with which I'm familiar was arranged by Hugh Porter.

The part that I noticed specifically is the music that accompanies the word "everywhere" in the lines "Go tell it on the mountain / Over the hills and everywhere."  I think the Simon & Garfunkel version treats this much better in relation to the text.

As far as I can tell, this is the music for everywhere, given as the individual parts and together:

There are two things here that I think are significant as far as the text.  First, Paul Simon's part sort of looks like the titular mountain.  Second, the parts are moving in opposite directions.  Garfunkel's moves down and then ascends; Simon's rises and then falls.  So, between the last two notes, there's an expansion in the parts, which helps to reflect the lyric - "Go tell it on the mountain / Over the hills and everywhere."  Garfunkel goes to the higher registers, and Simon to the lower.

The notation for the music as it appears in both Lutheran Worship and The Lutheran Service Book looks like this:

To some degree, this too reflects "Go tell it on the mountain / Over the hills and everywhere."  The first four notes could be seen as a sort of gesticulation.  It's the same sort of motion a farmer would make in casting seeds out into his field.  But I think Simon & Garfunkel's version is superior in mirroring the text to the music.  The shape of their phrase reflects the mountain itself, and the convergence and expansion of the harmony illustrates the telling mentioned in the title.

Additionally, the phrase in Porter's arrangement (in G major) ends on a G, so there's a feeling of completion.  But if the invocation is to "tell it... everywhere," it seems as if that phrase shouldn't resolve so soon.  Simon & Garfunkel's (which I'm pretty sure is in F major), ends that phrase with a C and an E.  There isn't any resolution there, implying that the telling still continues.