The Kingston Trio's "'Round about the Mountain"

For my Collection Audit project, I recently listened to the two-disc compilation album I have by the Kingston Trio.  When I listened to it last September, a line in "'Round about the Mountain" (written by Louis Gottlieb) sounded familiar to me.  I finally finished my transcription, so now I can write about the song.

One of the verses is:

If you can't pray like Peter
If you can't preach like Paul
Go home and tell your neighbor
That He died to save us all

I'm pretty sure that for this verse Gottlieb took some inspiration from the hymn "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" (text by David Marsh, music by Joseph Barnby).  Apparently, there are alternate verses, but in the version I'm familiar with (#318 in the Lutheran Worship hymnal), the second verse is:

If you cannot speak like angels, if you cannot preach like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus; you can say He died for all.
If you cannot rouse the wicked with the judgement's dread alarms,
You can lead the little children to the Savior's waiting arms.

The clause "If you can't preach like Paul" in Gottlieb's song is identical to Marsh's "if you cannot preach like Paul" (save for the contraction), which is the initial similarity I noticed.  Additionally, Gottlieb's "tell your neighbor / That He died to save us all" is quite similar to Marsh's "You can tell the love of Jesus; you can say He died for all."

After transcribing "'Round about the Mountain" and comparing it to "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" I found some more similarities.  These two verses - aside from the specific examples of Paul's preaching and telling of Christ's redemption - have the same general idea: even if you don't have the eloquence of angels or saints, you can still proclaim the message of Christ.  As Marsh puts it in a later verse: "Let none hear you idly saying, 'There is nothing I can do.'"

The last line of the Marsh verse quoted in full above might have inspired a recurring line in Gottlieb's song.  There are two repeated sections in "'Round about the Mountain":

'Round about the mountain
'Round about the mountain
My God is waiting
You can rise in His arms

and

The Lord loves a sinner
The Lord loves a sinner, man
The Lord loves a sinner
Who will rise in His arms

Both end with "ris[ing] in His arms," which isn't dissimilar to the image in Marsh's phrase "the Savior's waiting arms" (from Matthew 19:13-15).

Gottlieb's use of the phrase "If you can't preach like Paul" is the more irrefutable indication of the influence that "Hark, the Voice of Jesus Calling" probably had on him, but there might be something to these others too.