Several years back, as I prayerfully verbalize the Mandarin worship song "Jehovah is God" in my mother tongue Cantonese, I suddenly realize that the natural tones of the characters sounds out the music of the song, meaning that the song must have been written originally in Cantonese (a fact not known among my extensive Christian circle, and now confirmed by links below - note the comment for the CD Urban Renewal.)

This caused my great appreciation for Cantonese as a language, and Cantonese Christian songs in particular.

• Cantonese language contains the most number of tones (8-9) among all the world languages. In fact, as I sound out the do-re-mi, all 7 notes would allow valid Cantonese characters. This means that a finely composed lyrics could fit practically perfectly for the melody of a song, so that if you even read out the lyrics, you can guess what the melodies should be. For popular melodies, there would be no contest.
• One way to test the tonality extent of a language (whether English, Mandarin, Cantonese, ...):
  Take a word with 2 or 3 syllables, then try variations of do-re-mi on them, and see if it is natural at all if being part of a song. For example, with the English word Hello, it actually sound OK no matter if you sing it with 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, ... But not so with most Cantonese words. For Mandarin, actually most words would allow most melodies. So that means you can fit most Mandarin lyrics to whatever melody. Consequently, we have Cantonese as being the strictest, and hence, when properly rendered and fitted with the proper melody, being the most beautiful construction of all.
• In fact, I can imagine writing a program that would read in all the Cantonese characters and their tones (need someone to enter the tones for the list of several thousand characters), and with any input melody, to supply options for filling in words that approximate the music. This could aide songwriters or translators greatly.
• Not finding many Cantonese worship songs on CDs, I went on to collect many finely written Cantonese pop songs, which have lyrics fitting beautiful melodies. Among them, HK female pop singer Priscilla Chan's songs are the best written. I have subsequently collected MP3, VCD, and Music Video Karaoke DVD of her and other Chinese pop stars.
• This morning, as I find a lack of easy-to-learn children chinese songs for Daniel, I start to browse for Chinese worship songs, and find that there had been a steady growth of Chinese Christian songwriters over the past few years, particularly for Cantonese. (Before this, we only know about Melody of My Heart, Heavenly Melodies, and Stream of Praise, all these groups being in Mandarin.)

Below are the links to samples of some of the best CDs.

• Rejoice Cantonese Christian Fellowship links to all the existing Chinese Christian Music sites.
• Contemporary Chinese Christian Music provides sample songs to the existing 20+ CD albums from various artists. I bought from them the 2 JNX (next item) CDs, and the Urban Renewal CD.
• Joyful Noise Xpress has 2 albums (sampling available).
• Chinese Christian Herald Crusades offers 3 Cantonese and 1 accented Mandarin albums (whole songs for downloads.)
• NACCA features 4 competition CDs, and the Chinese Vineyard CD (which features Mandarin translations of famous worship songs.) The website is extremely slow with Flash (10 sec download time per page on broadband).

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