Published in Canada by General Publishing Company, Ltd., 30 Lesmill Road, Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.

Published in the United Kingdom by Constable and Company, Ltd., 10 Orange Street, London W. C. 2.

This Dover edition, first published in 1964, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work first published by J. J. Augustin, Publisher, New York City, in 1937.

The publisher is grateful to the University of Virginia Library for furnishing a copy of the book for purposes of reproduction.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-8268

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dover Publications, Inc.
180 Varick Street
New York 14, N.Y.

TO THE MEMORY
OF MY WIFE
INEZ EMELINE WRIGHT JACKSON

The ancestors of the bearers of the Southern tradition of folk-music began in very ancient times the practice of singing religious songs to folk-tunes. Nor must one think that this custom showed a lack of respect for religion. On the contrary, it rather emphasized the respect and love of the folk for their traditional music. As their most loved and treasured possession, they brought this noble musical heritage and laid it on the altar of their worship. There is a strong probability that this practice has continued unbroken for at least thirteen centuries. William of Malmsbury, writing in the twelfth century, gives an anecdote of St. Aldhelm, the Anglo-Saxon abbot of Malmsbury during the seventh century, which he took from the notebook of King Alfred the Great, which was extant at that time. According to this story, the Saint would station himself on a bridge in the guise of a gleeman and would collect an audience by singing popular songs. He would then gradually insert into his entertainment the words of the holy scriptures and so lead his hearers to salvation. The chronicler also states that one of the popular songs made by St. Aldhelm and mentioned by King Alfred was still being sung by the folk at the time of his writing, almost five hundred years later.

Chappell, in his Popular Music of the Olden Time, says: “We may date the custom of singing hymns to secular tunes from this time [The Norman Conquest] if, indeed, it may not be carried back to the time of St. Aldhelm. William of Malmesbury records of Thomas, Archbishop of York (created in 1070), that ‘whenever he heard any new secular song or ballad sung by the minstrels, he immediately composed parodies on the words to be sung to the same tune.’

“In a contribution to Notes and Queries, Mr. James Graves gives a curious list of eight songs similarly parodied in The Red Book of Ossory, a manuscript of the fourteenth century, which is preserved in the archives of that see. Six of the songs are English (there are two parodies on one of them), and the remaining two are Anglo-Norman. The Latin hymns seem to have been written by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory from 1318 to 1360. The names of the six English songs are as follows:

In the sixteenth century, the early Presbyterians continued this usage, as is evidenced by Wedderburn’s hymnal published in Edinburgh in 1560, quaintly entitled: Ane Compendius Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs, Collected out of Sundrie Parts of the Scriptures, with Sundrie of Other Ballates Changed out of Prophaine Songs, for Avoiding of Sin and Harlotrey. Among these latter was a parody of ‘John, Come Kiss Me,’ the wide and enduring popularity of which is attested by its inclusion in Queen Elizabeth’s Virginal Book, Playford’s Introduction, Apollo’s Banquet for the Treble Violin, Walsh’s Division Violin, Playford’s Division Violin and Pills to Purge Melancholy. There are also references to it in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Westminster Drollery, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, The Scourge of Folly, Braithwaite’s Shepherd’s Tales, Tom Tiler and his Wife, and Henry Bold’s Songs and Poems. Allan Cunningham quotes the parody in The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, as follows:

A similar book appeared in 1642, called: Psalms, or Songs of Zion, turned into the language and set to the tunes of a strange land, by William Slatyer, intended for Christmas Carols and fitted to divers of the most noted and common but solemn tunes, everywhere in this land familiarly used and known. That the Puritans of that century did not invariably confine themselves to “solemn tunes” is indicated by Shakespeare when the Clown in The Winter’s Tale, in praising the vocal prowess of the shearers, assembled for the sheep-shearing feast, says: “Three-man song-men, all, and very ix good ones...; but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings Psalms to hornepipes.” In the New Variorium Shakespeare, H. H. Furness, in commenting on the passage, says: “He sings Psalms to the lively tunes to which horn-pipes were danced,—a practice which, we know was extremely popular in France, and from allusions like the present we can infer that it was not unknown in England.”

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Puritan congregations of New England are said to have had music committees one of the chief duties of which was to go among the folk and gather attractive melodies to be used as hymns. And this was also the custom of the Primitive Methodists, both in Great Britain and in America. In writing of this usage at a later date, Chappell says: “The Primitive Methodists ... acting upon the principle of ‘Why should the devil have all the pretty tunes?’ collect the airs which are sung at pot and public houses, and write their hymns to them ... in this sect we have living examples of the ‘puritans who sing psalms to horn-pipes,’ They do not mince the matter by turning them into slow tunes, ... but sing them in their original lively time.”

This brings us to the nineteenth century, in which appeared the “shape-note hymnals” from which the material in this volume is chiefly drawn. The existence of these books was scarcely known to musicians and music-lovers until recently, when they were vividly brought to the attention of the musical world by Dr. George Pullen Jackson in his book, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. Music lovers were astonished to learn of the existence of these old books, containing a wealth of uniquely beautiful hymn-tunes, largely folk-tunes and others composed in the same idiom. A majority of these are in the old modes and among them are the tunes of folk-songs, ballads, country-dances and even morris-dances. But musicians were even more surprised to learn that there are literally hundreds of thousands of devotees, in homes, in little gatherings and big singing conventions covering a broad region which stretches from the Valley of Virginia to the plains of Texas, who enthusiastically preserve and practise this tradition. That this usage should have lived on from pioneer times into our present day, when not only what we buy but what we are, is stereotyped by the processes of mass production, seems little short of miraculous. But it is explained by the innate vigour of the tradition itself, by the great love of the tradition-bearers for the old tunes and, not least, by the fact that the books embodying the material used shape notes.

Shape notes, as is explained in White Spirituals, indicate their pitch by their shapes, independently of the lines and spaces of the staff. They were invented to simplify the reading of music. There are two principal systems, the Four Shape and the Seven Shape. In the Four Shape, the first and fourth degrees of the scale are called fa and are represented by a right triangle; the second and fifth are called sol, represented by a round shape; the third and sixth, la, by a square head and the seventh, mi, by a diamond. The Seven Shape system has a different form of note for each degree of the scale and the nomenclature accords with our general practice. The nomenclature of the Four Shape system is of especial interest because x it was known and practised by Shakespeare. Numerous references to it occur in his plays. In King Lear this system is employed in an almost Wagnerian manner to characterize the archvillain, Edmund, who in soliloquy says: “My cue is villanous melancholy” and then sings: “Fa, sol, la, mi.” These four tones measure the extent of a tritone, the forbidden interval called the diabolus or the devil and supposed to be filled with sinister, ominous and evil potency.

As shape notes increased in popularity, bitter controversy arose between their supporters and those of the ordinary staff notes. This was most fortunate, for it gave the fa-sol-la folk a coherence and a sturdier determination to abide by their principles and practices, which enabled them to resist the erosion of modern life and so preserve their beautiful heritage.

Many folk-tunes associated with sacred words have been passed down also solely by the process of oral tradition. Mr. Ernest La Prade, author of Alice in Orchestralia, recently learned of two groups of Primitive Baptists, one in New Jersey and the other in Philadelphia, which still use in their worship only tunes preserved by this process. He was fortunate enough to record several of the hymns from a member of the New Jersey congregation, some of which were modal and all of which were of the type contained in the shape-note books.

The value of these books to students and lovers of our folk-music is incalculable. For although many of the tunes are still extant in the oral tradition, a large portion of them, of indubitable folk origin, have vanished from the oral tradition and, but for these books, would be entirely lost. All who are familiar with the folk-dance revival in England realize the importance of Playford’s English Dancing Master in preserving a large number of tunes and dances that were no longer traditionally extant. The folk material embodied in the shape-note books is no less important and far more varied; it is, in fact, indispensible to all who desire a comprehensive knowledge of British and American folk-music.

Gratitude is due Dr. Jackson for making this material accessible to the public, and admiration, for the painstaking and scholarly way in which he presents his fascinating subject. The tunes are historically important in showing approximately the state of the oral tradition at the time they were written down in the past century. It would be difficult to overestimate their esthetic value. In metrical and rhythmic structure, especially in balance and contrast in phrase lengths; in beauty and eloquence of melodic line, many are unsurpassed by even the best of our traditional tunes. It is not too much to hope that a revival of interest in this music may result in a general use of it in our churches, where its native vigour, unaffected straightforwardness and lyric beauty could go far in freeing us from the insipid banalities of much present-day church music.

John Powell

Since the sort of folk-song indicated by the title of this book is in all probability unfamiliar to many, I shall assume that my chief task in this Introduction is to make its nature clear. The first step in this explanation will be to distinguish the present material from some other better known sorts of folk-song.

“Is it mountain songs you are collecting? Is it those old ballads?” “Is it the negro spirituals?” These questions were put to me again and again by interested persons while the present collection was in the making.

No, these are not mountain songs and still they are. What do we mean by mountain songs? The very first mountain song I ever recorded was sung to me on the treeless flats of North Dakota. It had arrived there from Kentucky by way of Saint Louis and Los Angeles and had been carried over this circuitous route to its northwestern place of recording by the singers in three generations of one family. The first sailor’s shanty I ever heard was in the mountains of Virginia. It had come from a logging camp in Michigan by way of Chicago. Every folk-song hunter can tell similar tales; and all such experiences convince us that the naming of a type of song after a restricted region or a particular environment, while furnishing a convenient designation, may lead also to much misunderstanding.

The mountain songs designation is one of the least appropriate. Its only justification lies in the fact that some types of traditional song, the secular ballads among them, have persisted perhaps in larger numbers in mountainous regions like those of the southern Appalachians and the Ozarks and are more widely sung there than elsewhere. These songs were Irish, Scotch, and English across the water. They came from highlands and lowlands. They were the common possession of early Americans of those ethnic stocks,—those people who never left the tidewater parts, those who came into the highlands and settled there, and those greater numbers who trekked through the mountain gaps, down the western slopes and spread into the rolling country and plains. The present collection is of songs sung by all these people in all of these parts in early and more recent times and now. Hence, to call them “mountain songs” would be quite inadequate and misleading.[1]

Those who asked if the present collection were to be of the “old ballads” manifested by their question some acquaintance with one variety, an important one withal, of traditional secular folk-song in America. My answer to them was negative, as it is to my present readers. This collection is made up neither of the secular 2 ballads nor of their close relatives, the secular folk-songs, as far at least as their texts are concerned. Nor is it a collection of negro spirituals or negro songs of any kind. And yet it is one of folk-songs, and spiritual ones, as its title truthfully indicates. I shall now attempt to explain this; for it must seem to some an anomaly. The explanation will necessitate my making a brief survey first of recent trends in the activities of those interested in folk-songs.

Until recent years practically all the folk-songs published in America have been those with secular texts. The existence of traditional spiritual folk-songs in this land seems not to have been recognized by folklorists. Negro songs were, to be sure, largely spiritual and they have been regarded as folksongs; but that was an entirely different matter, one in which the students of the white man’s culture were not primarily interested. Early curiosity as to the “slave songs” was not academic. It was rather a popular interest allied with one which was of a missionary-religious nature. The songs themselves, as they became known in northern and eastern centers during the post-Civil War period through the activities of traveling concert groups from southern negro schools, were popularly believed in those parts to be the negroes’ own creations and to be rooted in Africa. They were regarded thus as lying essentially outside the sphere of the white man’s cultural traditions. These attitudes of mind tended to hold apart the two groups, those concerned with the white man’s song traditions and those interested in the religious songs of the black folk. It was a negro-song apologist, Henry E. Krehbiel, who signed, as he thought, the decree of complete separation of the two song bodies with his book Afro-American Folk Songs in 1914; and for most people that was definitive. Even as late as the end of the 1920’s Krehbiel’s word stood practically unchallenged. I shall adduce evidence presently however of the error of his assumption.

In the mean time knowledge of our own American folk-songs deepened and broadened. The earlier interest, one which grew out of the soil tilled by Francis J. Child and was confined to the ballads alone, shorn of their tunes, expanded in the latter part of the second decade of the present century into one which included also folk-songs and the tunes of both ballads and songs. Notable among folklorists with this more comprehensive outlook was the late Cecil J. Sharp who, after long experience in the English folk-song field, took up the hunt in the southern Appalachians. Even the first collection of a part of his findings, published in 1917, provided a revelation as to the wealth of the existing material and was recognized as a model in the matter of musical recording. From then on, the gathering of folk-songs was carried on with renewed enthusiasm and with greater stress laid on the melodies.

One phase of song hunting began in the middle of the 1920’s outside the circle of the folklorists and in complete ignorance of the facts that what was sought was genuine folk material. I refer to the study in the field of the southern religious “country singings”. I make this charge of ignorance the more unhesitatingly since it was my own, and since I worked alone in that field for some years. A report of the early stages of my work appeared in 1933 in a volume entitled White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. Readers of that book have probably recognized that, while I may have told the story of the country singing institution quite thoroughly, I realized then only dimly that the songs under observation were folk-traditional. This realization has come since then gradually, first by reason of a series of accidental findings and more recently as the result of rather extended study.

Why the folklorists never came upon this material before it fell into my hands is not hard to explain. One reason is that the strongest link binding the songs in question to the traditional secular folk-songs is their tunes, and all musical considerations were generally neglected, especially by the earlier folklorists in this land. Another reason was probably that folklorists never thought, any more than I did, of singing groups which used song books, as likely environment for their search. A third reason was that the country songs were religious, a sort which was and is still generally thought of as church music and thus as being far removed from the folk. And finally, collectors have as a rule sought folk-songs in the mountains and other remote places; whereas the country singings are found in the less sparsely populated parts of the lower uplands.

Cecil Sharp should have escaped much of this prejudice and misconception; for his own British Isles are full of religious folk-songs, as he well knew; even though they do not appear there to any extent in a group-singing environment. But that he did not escape it is indicated clearly by his experience in the southern mountains, as he tells of it in the Introduction to his English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. When he came to a home in the mountains and made known his desire to hear songs, he was generally misunderstood. The mountain people thought he wanted to hear them sing “hymns”. But he did not; and though he does not tell us why, he indicates that it was because he was convinced that the “hymns” were not folk-songs. At any rate, he soon learned to ask for “love songs”. And as a result there appeared but two songs of a religious nature, the ‘Cherry Tree Carol’ and ‘Hicks’ Farewell’, among the 122 in his first publication. In the subsequent two-volume collection of his American findings, edited by Maud Karpeles and published in 1932, we find a group of but half a dozen religious songs under the heading “Hymns”. There are also a few biblical ballads in the collection.

Some years after Sharp missed all but completely his opportunity to become the discoverer, or uncoverer, of American religious folk-songs, one of his English co-workers, Anne G. Gilchrist, found some remarkable analogies between the secular folk-songs of England on the one hand and the spiritual songs of the early Primitive Methodists of that land and the early American revivalists on the other; 4 and she published a report of her research in the Journal of the [English] Folk-Song Society, viii (1927-1931), pp. 61-95, in an article entitled “The Folk Element in Early Revival Hymns and Tunes.” This was a real though brief contribution to the very subject which engages us here; for it demonstrated the linking of the nineteenth century religious songs with the older and principally secular folk tradition of her land.

At about the same time, two Americans made smaller contributions. Ethel Park Richardson recorded eleven of the white man’s “spirituals” from oral tradition, as it seems, and included them in her American Mountain Songs; and Samuel E. Asbury furnished the Texas Folk-Lore Society with a group of camp-meeting songs which he had heard in the 1880’s in western North Carolina. The Society published them in 1932.

On Miss Gilchrist’s pages and even more often on the pages of American collectors in the late 1920’s appeared indications of a growing belief that the old white spirituals were the progenitors of the negro spirituals and that, therefore, Krehbiel’s assumption as to negro authorship of the slave songs was in a measure erroneous. Among those who shared constructively in this belief were Newman I. White and Guy B. Johnson. Mr. White consulted a number of the old country-song manuals to good advantage in the preparation of his American Negro Folk-Songs. His use of them was to find merely textual antecedents of negro spiritual borrowings. Mr. Johnson used some of the same manuals happily in the preparation of his Folk Culture on St. Helena Island. His purpose, like that of Mr. White, was to show negro song sources; but his work had the added merit of calling attention to some musical analogies between the spiritual songs of the white and the black Americans. My own contributions to the solution of the problem of negro song sources are mentioned on page 9 of this Introduction. All this evidence assumes considerable weight in proof of the thesis that the negro spirituals, instead of lying outside the white people’s song tradition, represent a selective adoption and carrying-on of that tradition.

If the preceding paragraphs have in a measure made clear the nature of the songs to be presented here, they have done so by the method of elimination and by a review of some of the directions taken recently by students of song, trends which seem to have led inevitably to the uncovering of the body of song found in the old manuals of the country singers and to the establishing of its status as folk-song. It is the revealing of this material and the establishing of its identity which are the chief reasons for the existence of the present volume.

The old song books spoken of above contain various sorts of religious pieces. Among these are the early psalm tunes, evangelical hymns, spiritual songs, religious ballads, “fuguing” songs, and anthems. Each of these varieties represents 5 loosely a phase of, or a period in, religious, musical, or poetic development. Some are folk-songs and many are not. The psalm tunes with their Old-Testament texts—the sober song fare of the early Protestants in Europe, in the British Isles, and in the American Colonies—are probably to some extent of folk origin; but since psalm singing in early America can not be looked on as a free expression of the folk, and since the psalm tunes themselves gave way easily to other far more folky types of religious song, I have chosen to exclude them from the present discussion and collection. The fuguing songs are examples of an early American art development in composing and in group singing in New England during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Despite their enduring popularity in southern rural folk-singing circles and despite the fact that many of them are found to be constructed on the basis of folk-melodic themes, I have decided that they would be inappropriate to this collection. The same objection, that they are of an essentially composed nature, holds also for the anthems and has demanded their elimination.

After making these exclusions I centered attention on three mutually rather distinct types of song all of which seemed to be in varying degrees folk products—the religious ballads, hymns, and spiritual songs.

The religious ballads by and large are folk-produced beyond any reasonable doubt. They are uniformly songs for individual singing, not for groups. The sung story was the thing. In one ballad it would be the story of some bad woman, Wicked Polly for example, “who died in sin and deep despair” and went to hell; in another, of some good woman, the Romish Lady for instance, who was burned at the stake for espousing the Protestant cause. Much ballad material was furnished also by the Bible. Scriptural events like the curing of the man sick with the palsy, the restoring of sight to blind Bartimeus, Daniel’s experience in the lions’ den, the raising of Lazarus, the baby Moses in the rushes, the Prodigal Son parable, the birth of Christ, His crucifixion and death,—all are retold in the ballads.

A younger variety of song which I include under the heading of religious ballads is that in which the singer tells his story in the first person. Such stories are those of the poor wayfaring stranger just a-going over Jordan, the departing preacher or missionary, a dying boy or girl, and even a pious gold hunter dying on his way to California. The story may be also the plaint of the religious “mourner”, the backslider, and the criminal sinner, or the exultant tale of the saved. Still another group of ballads is aimed more directly at the conversion of the “young, the gay, and proud.” They usually begin by telling the religious experience of the singer and close with a warning as to the tragic results of worldliness and an exhortation to turn from “this vain world of sin.” These songs are quite similar to the worldly ballads in form, and their tunes are, as will be pointed out presently, of the common folk stock.

The ballads (excepting the experience variety) probably did not originate in any particular organized religious movement. The folk-hymns were, on the other hand, bound up genetically with the protestant evangelical activity which followed John Wesley’s lead in England and then in America. The Wesleyan Revival began as an ordered small-group affair and spread and developed ultimately into a movement whose aspects and practices were completely free-affairs of the uninhibited masses. In the same way the song of that movement, beginning with merely the taste of textual freedom offered by Watts and the Wesleys, and of musical freedom offered by those who furnished the melodies, spread ultimately far beyond the “allowed” tunes and hymn texts of the authorities until religious gatherings were musically completely liberated.

When John Wesley picked up a popular melody here and there on his travels through England and set it to a good hymn text, he little realized that he was setting an example and starting a movement which was to bring into existence hundreds of folk-hymns; that is, songs with old folk-tunes which everybody could sing and with words that spoke from the heart of the devout in the language of the common man.

With the spread of this movement to America a fertile soil for its further development seems to have been found. Here it became known as the Great Southern and Western Revival. Here its store of songs, made after the pattern used in England, was greatly enlarged. In fact the masses took the matter of what they were to sing so completely into their own hands that the denominational authorities, especially the Methodists, though they tried to control it, became helpless.[2]

In looking through the folk-hymns in the second part of this collection one will see scores of tunes which are clearly recognizable as those still sung to ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Lord Lovel’ and other ancient ballads. This is adequate evidence, I assume, as to where the folk sought and found its hymn tunes. The extent of this tune borrowing process is indicated on page 18f of this Introduction. The texts, on the other hand, may be from the pen of Watts or other eighteenth century English religious poets, or they may be the humbler creations of rural American religious verse makers, like John Adam Granade, or John Leland.

It is impossible to date the beginning of folk-hymn making and singing in America definitely. But on the assumption that they were a part of the Wesleyan movement, we cannot place the beginning of their general use in America before the 1770’s. The part of the land where they first attained popularity—again judging by their Wesleyan affinities—was the upland and inland South; for during the last two decades of the eighteenth century (the time of the first spread 7 of the Methodist movement) four-fifths of the adherents to this sect were to be found in that section.[3]

The revival spiritual songs represent a further advance of the song movement which brought forth the folk-hymns, toward the folk level. As the eighteenth century expired the post-Wesleyan religious tide was high and the camp meeting, the significant institution which became the cradle of the revival spiritual songs, was born. One may therefore get a clearer insight into this new song development if one recalls the character of its early environment. One might well remember, for example, that the camp meetings began and remained in nature surroundings, in the wilderness; that they were immense holiday gatherings;[4] that they thus took on the free-and-easy aspects of the pioneers as a whole rather than of any particular class; and that they were completely free from denominational and all other authoritarian control.

Bearing all this in mind it is perhaps easier to understand how the folk-hymns—grown up in a less boisterous environment—failed to satisfy the new conditions. At the camp meetings it was not a question of inducing every one to sing, but of letting every one sing, of letting them sing songs which were so simple that they became not a hindrance to general participation but an irresistible temptation to join in. The tunes of the folk-hymns were adequate. But the texts (Watts, Wesley and their schools) still demanded a certain exercise of learning and remembering which excluded many from the singing. The corrective lay in the progressive simplification of the texts; and it was in the main this text simplification which brought about and characterised the type of camp-meeting song which was called, in contradistinction to all other types, the spiritual song.

The methods of song-text reducing are familiar. When the American youth sings

he is not only following a practice of the early spiritual song makers and singers—his horse-shoe song itself is a parody of a spiritual in this collection—but he is singing in the infinitely older manner of his race. He is singing an organically constructed tune and refusing to let words interfere with it, a tendency which may be observed from ‘Sumer is icumen in’ to the nineteenth century songs of sailors and to other work-songs and children’s songs, like that of ‘The Big Bad Wolf’, today.

The text simplification in religious folk-songs began modestly. The variety of spiritual song which is closest to the folk-hymn is that in which each short stanza of text (four short lines usually) is followed by a chorus of the same length, as for example:

The verse was mastered probably by comparatively few singers, even though it may have been “lined out” by the song leader. But the whole assemblage had its chance to join lustily in singing the chorus.

A simpler form of spiritual song went directly into a refrain after the first text couplet:

Then came the chorus:

An offspring of this same ‘Morning Trumpet’ song may serve to illustrate the next step in simplification, one in which the singers, instead of using new poetic lines in subsequent stanzas, were satisfied with slight variations of those already sung:

and so on, with “leaders,” “converts,” etc. without end.

The next step is seen in those songs where one short phrase is sung three times and then followed by a one-phrase refrain:

These songs were sometimes called “choruses,” for they are often really nothing else,—detached choruses, the text varied a bit from verse to verse, functioning as complete songs.

The last word in brevity of text is where simply one short phrase or sentence, sung over and over, is made to fill out the whole tune frame as a stanza. ‘Death, Ain’t You Got No Shame’, in this collection is one example among many. Such songs as this were too meager to be welcomed warmly into the old song books. They survive therefore chiefly in oral tradition. But meagerness of text is not, we must remember, any criterion of the worth of a religious folk-song. ‘Hebrew Children,’ for example, the song from which I have just cited a stanza, is at once extremely chary of words and rich in tonal beauty. This becomes evident when one sees Annabal Morris Buchanan’s arrangement of it for modern chorus.

It was the spiritual songs, rather than the hymns or the ballads, which appealed subsequently most deeply to the negroes and have reappeared most often among the religious songs of that race. In White Spirituals I presented twenty different negro songs and traced them, both tunes and texts, directly to as many early religious songs of the white people. In the present collection upwards of 60 songs have been found to be the legitimate tune-and-words forebears of the same number of negro spirituals. (Incidentally, all of the songs just used here to illustrate the steps in text simplification have been borrowed by the black man and made over.) These negro offspring songs are mentioned by title, and information as to where I found them is given in the notes under each of the songs concerned.[5]

The tunes of the secular folk-songs came into the religious environment—into the folk-hymns and spiritual songs—with little change. What one could sing by himself to secular words all could sing in a gathering to religious words. The new surroundings made only one added demand,—that the singers indulge in fewer vocal liberties than they might have enjoyed when singing the same tunes in their homes and alone. I refer to those liberties in personal interpretation, a quaint characteristic of individual folk singing which has given the collectors their numerous variants of one and the same song. Group singers had now to agree on one version of a tune and stick fairly closely to it. I say fairly closely, for the religious singers allowed but few of their tunes to become completely standardized. This will become clear when one studies the variants of certain folk-hymn and spiritual-song tunes in this compilation.

In the earlier years of the camp-meeting movement, few if any of the songs produced in and for that environment appeared in print. The whole body of revival song was therefore generally known as “unwritten music.” The first recordings were of the texts only. They appeared in the form of booklets and bore some such title as “Hymns and Spiritual Songs / for the Pious of all Denominations / as Sung in Camp Meetings.” They were prepared first by itinerant preachers or song leaders who saw in the Great Revival a chance to serve the cause, and perhaps to make money. That these books filled a great need is attested by their ubiquity during the period which may be designated roughly as from 1800 to 1840.

The musical notation of the tunes they sang was the least concern of the revival folk. It is quite probable that the camp-meeting crowds of those times never saw their tunes in musical notation. It is evident that the first recordings of this unwritten music were not made by the revivalists themselves, and that the first book collections of such recordings were not made primarily for use in revivals. The books in which these tunes first appeared were the country singing manuals of which I have spoken above. The singing masters were quick to recognize the value of the rousing revival songs and saw to it that their own institution benefitted from their vogue. The Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805 was perhaps the first book to record the revival tunes. The Olive Leaf, a Georgia book of 1878 was the last.[6]

We sometimes have the compiler’s own story of his sources. In the preface to William Caldwell’s Union Harmony for example, the compiler tells us that “many of the airs which the author has reduced to system [notated] and harmonized have been selected from the unwritten music in general use” among Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. William Walker says, in the preface to his Southern Harmony, “I have composed parts to a great many good airs, which I could not find in any publication or in manuscript, and assigned my name as the author.” William Hauser’s preface to his compendious Hesperian Harp is lacking in my copy of his work (the only copy in existence, I believe); but the compiler’s method of finding songs becomes clear when we peruse his pages of song. On the page with ‘Patton’, for example, he notes that he first heard the Rev. William Patton, of Missouri, sing the song which bears his name “at a camp-meeting, North Cove, Burk Country, North Carolina, in 1831 or 1832.” The song entitled ‘Houston’ was an “air I learned from my mother when a small child.” As to ‘Land of Rest’ he states that the “inspiration of this tune [was] caught from a female voice at a distance, at Barbee’s Hotel, High Point, N. C., June 9th, 1868.” Under the song 11 entitled ‘Rev. James Axley’s Song,’ in the same compiler’s Olive Leaf, he tells who the Rev. Axley was and how he, Hauser, came to record the preacher’s favorite tune. John G. McCurry gives a song called ‘Good-By’ in his Social Harp and tells that he put it down “as played on the accordion by Mrs. Martha Hodges of Hartwell,” Georgia.

Instances like these cited above are numerous. They all go to convince us of the great service rendered by the rural singing masters of yore in the preservation of a body of song, in the collecting and publishing of which no one else seems to have been interested.

The country singing books on which I have drawn for most of the songs of this collection, are in the main those which were at my disposal while I was preparing White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. From the Georgia-Carolina section were The Southern Harmony in its 1835 and 1854 editions; The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist (1845); The Sacred Harp which first appeared in 1844 but whose oldest edition at my disposal has been that of 1859; its three descendants, The Union Harp (1909), The Sacred Harp (Cooper edition, 1902 and four subsequent printings; I consulted the fifth reprint), and The Original Sacred Harp (1911);[7] The Hesperian Harp (1848); The Social Harp (1855); The Christian Harmony (1866); and The Olive Leaf (1878). Among the books originating in the eastern half of Tennessee I searched The Western Harmony (1824); The Columbian Harmony (1825); The Union Harmony (1837); The Knoxville Harmony (1838); The Harp of Columbia (1848); and The Western Psalmodist (1853). From the Valley of Virginia I used The Kentucky Harmony (1814); the German Choral-Music (1816); The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony (1820); The Virginia Harmony (1831); Genuine Church Music (1832); and The Union Harmony (1848). From Saint Louis I had The Missouri Harmony (1820). I found also some material in two publications which are still in use among the Primitive Baptists, The Primitive Baptist Hymn and Tune Book (1902) and Good Old Songs (1913).[8] Two books, invaluable compendiums of the very sort of songs I was seeking, came to my hand too late for consideration in White Spirituals. They were The Revivalist, published in Troy, New York, in 1868; and Jeremiah Ingalls’ Christian Harmony, published in New Hampshire in 1805. The latter contains scores of religious folk-songs—among them many spiritual songs—which duplicate, though in variant forms, the songs which are found in abundance in the southern country-song manuals. The Revivalist, more than 60 years younger, is a veritable treasure trove of the same sorts of song. Together the two books open new vistas as to the spread and active life period of the song movement under observation. The New Hampshire book, 12 made by a Vermont compiler, proves beyond doubt that the movement did not remain in the South—the section of its first prevalence presumably and of its present persistence—but spread early also into New England. The New York book points definitely to the persistence of the tradition in the northeastern section far longer than we would, without this evidence, have been warranted in assuming.

I went song hunting also among the authored hymn-and-tune-books of the big denominations, but I found little, and that little was already familiar to me from its appearance in the country-singing books.[9]

Further information as to the identity of the books mentioned above may be found in the Bibliography at the end of this volume. The abbreviations which will be used in the body of this song collection when referring to the source song books are explained in the List of Abbreviations of Titles.

Even after recognizing the three types of religious folk-song as they are described above, it was not always easy in particular instances, to decide on acceptance into this collection or on rejection as non-folk material.

There are literally thousands of songs in the books searched. In the Original Sacred Harp alone there are 609, and the Hesperian Harp holds 677. And while other books are slimmer and duplications from book to book are numerous, it must still be quite evident that it was no easy task to identify just the songs I was after. At times I had to apply a number of criteria. Often the folky nature of the text pointed to an equally folky tune. There was another hint sometimes in the name given as that of the composer of the song. When I met with the names Moore, Walker, Chapin, Breedlove, White, Carrell, Davisson, Hauser, McCurry and a number of others, in the upper right corner of the song page, then I was practically certain that the song on that page was usable. For the men in question were, in reality, not composers. They were recorders and arrangers of unwritten music.[10]

When an example of the old unwritten music made its way into the authorized church hymnals—as happened to a restricted degree from fifty to seventy-five years ago—it was called a “Western Melody” or a “Southern Melody.” Such designations became another reliable token of folk source.

More important than any external indications in determining whether I was dealing in a particular instance with a folk-tune, was the character of the tune itself. The ability to recognize a folk-tune comes to the student of such music gradually, somewhat as does the recognition of a strange language or dialect. It came to me that way; but after assembling my tunes I felt that their general folk character might to some degree be reduced to a set of definite traits. I therefore reexamined not only my own melodies but also those far more numerous tunes in the secular collections of Sharp and others, for such characteristics as tonal trend, rhythmic trend, tonality (modal character), and musical form. Since there is no available definition of a folk-tune and since probably no succinct one can be made, I am hoping that my deductions in the following paragraphs as to some earmarks of American folk-tunes may be helpful to others who are interested in our traditional melodism, as they have been helpful to me.

The very beginning of a folk-tune has characteristic marks. The first accented note is usually the tonic of its scale. In almost all cases this first-accent note is preceded by an up-beat note which also is usually a tonic. The upbeat note coming second in frequency is the lower 5 of the scale, with the higher 3 even less often thus employed. The interval, if any, between the up-beat and the first accented note is thus either an ascending fourth, an ascending third (in those cases where these first two notes are 1 and 3) or descending third. And these intervals, though small, are often broken or bridged by an unaccented intervening note. Tunes beginning with an interval of a fifth (ascending 1 to 5 or descending 5 to 1) are quite rare. Common folk-tune beginnings are thus:

As to melodic trend within the body of the tune, I shall speak only briefly. It is a broad subject, too broad to be discussed adequately in this connection. A survey of my tune-thematic card catalog reveals, however, a few characteristics of this melodic trend. The first is that the tunes assume usually an initial upward trend. Another is that the steps or intervals employed are small, predominantly seconds, 14 thirds, fourths, and fifths. Greater intervals are found however at the juncture of two phrases. From these observations we may assume that the American folk-singer does not like big intervals.[11] This assumption, based on recorded tunes, is strengthened when one listens to folk singing and notices their anticipatory slides or scoops in approaching a tone that is only a little higher or lower than the one just sung, a practice which may be interpreted as an anticipation of, and an attempt to master, that which is vocally difficult. But while the individual jumps from note to note are not as a rule great, the pitch compass of the entire tune is often surprisingly wide. The melodies usually end in a descending cadence to the tonic.

Along with the great variety in form which we meet among American folk-tunes, there are certain melodic formulas which seem to be favorites and reappear with unimportant variations as the tonal vestment of many different songs, so many indeed that they might well be looked on as wandering tunes (reminding one of the familiar wandering stanzas in folk texts) or, since they are not identical from song to song, tune families.

In the present collection I have come upon six tune families of different sizes and have named them in each instance after the song which seems to be the most representative member of the family. They are the ‘Lord Lovel’ family, cast in the ionian mode; ‘I Will Arise’, aeolian and ionian; ‘Hallelujah’, mixolydian; ‘Kedron’, aeolian; ‘Babe of Bethlehem’, dorian; and ‘Roll Jordan’, ionian. The tunes in this collection and elsewhere belonging to the ‘Lord Lovel’ family are listed under the song ‘Dulcimer’. Those belonging to the other families are listed under the songs for which the family is named.

In the matter of metrical patterns we find also a variety, and favorites. We have noted the almost universal use of the up-beat. The up-beat initiates two different rhythmic trends, one of which is the iambic, the prevalent one in American folk-tunes: ²/₄ ♩ | ♩′. This two-part type of accent unit (of notes or syllables, whichever way we approach the matter), while occurring in series of four and three, as we have seen, may be found occasionally also in twos, fives, and sixes. Indeed the folk-tunes not infrequently show a refreshing independence of the demands of perfect quadraticality. The other rhythmic trend initiated by the up-beat is the less often used one made up of three-part units, which appear either in three-four time, ¾ ♩ | ♩′ ♩ or slow six-eight time, ⁶/₈ ♪ | ♪′ ♪. With more notes (syllables) in this single amphibrachic unit, the series of such units grows naturally in syllabic 15 length. It often outgrows thus its function as a mere melodic phrase and tends to assume that of the melodic sentence. A fine example of this is in Sharp’s recording of the ‘Cherry-Tree Carol’.

But while the vast majority of folk-tunes follow one or the other of the above described patterns, we must remember that metrical precision or mechanical adherence to any formula is the least of the folk’s concerns. Indeed, we should be justified in assuming such exactness, as seen in text lines of carefully measured lengths and in perfection of rhyme, to be sure signs of individual creative participation; whereas greater freedom and variability in tune and text aspects are obviously characteristic of the folk’s vocalism.

The folk-tunes of America are not, in the main, built up on scales of the diatonic major and minor systems which, as is well known, have assumed their present form under the demands of harmony; but on a modal system which grew out of melodic exigences long before harmony made its conquest of the music of western civilisation. Nor do the folk-tunes of this country make use of all the tones of even these modal scales. They often employ but five or six of the seven available tones, leaving characteristic gaps in such scales.

American folk-tune collectors have had their troubles in the interpretation of modal melodies. I have had mine. Even such a life-long student of these things as Cecil Sharp met many a knotty problem in classifying his Appalachian tunes. In view of this difficulty I called on Hilton Rufty, a thorough musician and a reliable authority in the folk-music field, to lend a hand in the modal classification of these tunes. He generously acceded to my request; and by the time my requests had ceased and before his generosity had been exhausted he had checked or corrected all my modal classifications of the tunes in this collection. In making clear Mr. Rufty’s effective and practical method of identifying the character of tunes I shall reproduce his Classification Chart and quote here his explanation of it.

An examination of these spiritual folk-tunes reveals a great predominance of gapped scales. Only 23 per cent of them use the full seven-tone series; 44 per cent are hexatonic; 23 per cent are pentatonic; and seven tunes use only from 1 to 5 of their scale.

The incidence of the different modes has been impossible to ascertain. We are sure of a mode, as Mr. Rufty has noted, only when the scale tones are all represented in the melody. Proceeding however in questionable instances according to the more or less clear modal implication, I have found that about 52 per cent of these tunes may be interpreted as ionian (major), about 30 per cent as aeolian, 7.5 per cent each as dorian[12] and mixolydian, and three tunes as phrygian.

I leave the interpretation of the significance of these figures to others. I venture to suggest however that they will be found to indicate a survival of gapped and modal tunes that is unique in the folk-music of today among peoples of European stock.[13]

A modally constructed tune is, as I have indicated, almost sure to be a folk-tune. And if a melody shows the characteristic gaps, its folk nature is quite assured. Indeed, the complete filling-in of the gaps, creating two half steps, is a sign, though not always a sure one, of art influence.[14]

The above paragraphs show in a general way a few of the more important and evident features by which American folk-tunes may be recognised.[15] Their presence or absence in specific cases has helped me to decide as to the fitness of a tune for acceptance into this collection.

I have indicated above (page 6) that many of the present tunes were borrowed outright from secular folk-songs. The tune-to-tune relationships were discovered to some degree, as I have indicated, by accident. A spiritual tune would remind me of a secular one. I would look it up in Sharp or elsewhere, verify the relationship, 18 and note it under the proper song in this collection. Such accidents, however, account for but comparatively few of my related-tune discoveries. In most instances they came to light as the result of a methodical comparison made possible by my having catalogued my spiritual folk-tunes and a large number of secular folk-melodies. I shall not go into a detailed explanation of this cataloguing method here, chiefly because it is one which, though it answered my own purposes well, would probably be found inadequate as a tool for students of comparative melody in general. I shall say merely that the catalog was a card index of tune beginnings, all transposed to a key which had two flats as its signature. The arrangement was based on the scale position or relative pitch of the first few tones. At the beginning of the catalog were those tunes which began on b-flat, then came those beginning on c and so on. The arrangement among those tunes beginning on any one tone, followed the same pitch sequence, from lowest to highest, taking into consideration the second, third, and more notes of the tune beginnings where necessary. That is, my lexicographical arrangement was like that of the dictionary, but with notes on a regular staff taking the place of letters, and with the scale steps taking the place of alphabetical sequence.

The actual working out of this scheme may be observed in the arrangement of tunes in this collection. In each of the three parts the tunes appear in their catalog sequence.[16]

Through a consistent comparison of the tunes in this catalog with those in secular tune files made on the same plan, I have been able to discover the organic relationship of upwards of 150 melodies in this collection to an even greater number of traditional folk-tunes associated with secular texts. This greater number is explained by the fact that one and the same tune in this collection was often found related to a number of worldly songs. To one tune ‘Pilgrim’, for example, I discovered 17 secular related melodies. The relationship runs in degree all the way from one which is barely recognizable to one which consists in an almost note-for-note identity.

The catalogs were also of distinct value in bringing to light scores of interrelated tunes within the collection, and thus in bringing to light the tune families mentioned on page 14 above.

The search for kindred secular tunes was most fruitful in the case of the ballads and somewhat less so for the hymns. Among the spiritual songs the search yielded surprizingly meager results. The reason lay probably in the nature of 19 the spiritual-song tunes themselves. These tunes—whatever their source—were often altered through the arbitrary intrusion of refrains and choruses. Among these tunes, therefore, my finding of secular analogies was limited usually to melodic parts instead of whole tunes.

To be sure, the tune relationships, religious to secular, which I have pointed out, touch little more than half the songs under scrutiny. But when it is taken into consideration that the related secular tunes were all found in a body of British Isles-American melodies not much greater than that of the spiritual tunes themselves, then it would not seem unreasonable to assume that a complete catalog of American worldly folk-tunes would reveal cognates to many more, possibly to all of the tunes presented here. The kinships already discovered, however, warrant the assumption that these spiritual tunes are part and parcel of the ancestral folk-melodism of the English-speaking peoples.

The worldly-religious tune comparison has also shed more light on the motives which led the revival folk to borrow from the store of secular melody and on the manner of that borrowing. We have indicated above our belief that one motive was the crying need for rousing and familiar tunes. Another reason seems to have been the mere fact that the borrowed tunes were worldly. Worldliness was of itself an asset. Fighting the devil with his own weapons had its distinct advantages in revival technics. But just how and why a particular secular tune came into the religious atmosphere is not always evident. In some instances, however, the examination of the secular original song makes this clear.

When the revivalist heard the Scottish-American sing

he evidently saw at once the possibilities of turning the text to his own evangelistic purposes, and wasted little time in making it over into ‘Sinner’s Invitation:’

which he sang to the same tune.

The ballad tune to

went over easily into the song which told of the Christian voyager who was ‘Bound for Canaan.’

The old ballad ‘Geordie’ begins

The revival singers took this hint, with its tune phrase, and produced, in ‘Victoria’:

In the traditional ballad ‘In Seaport Town’ there is a recurring phrase:

This “valley” suggested to the religious mind the emotional depression of the almost converted mourner as well as the valley of death; and thus came into existence the beautiful spiritual ‘Lonesome Valley’:

whose tune is closely related to that of the secular song.

The ‘Poor Stranger’ of the English secular ballad who appeared also as “poor strange girl,” a “roving soldier,” and a “rebel soldier,” all of whom are “far from my home,” exerted both melodic and textual influence on the ‘Heaven-Born Soldier’ who urges his comrades to

The melody which Johann Sebastian Bach, the great adapter of folk-tunes, made a peasant sing in his Cantata ‘Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet’ spread to England and became there the setting of a number of popular texts in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of these songs, dating from 1772, was ‘Farewell, Ye Green Fields and Sweet Groves’ which gave birth, probably also in England, to the religious song ‘Green Fields’, found in every old southern fasola book. Its opening lines are

With ‘Saw Ye my True Love’ as a model, the task of making the religious text ‘Saw Ye My Savior,’ sung to the same tune, was a grateful one.

The happy inebriate who is his own hero in ‘Way Up On Clinch Mountain’ is reformed and regretful in ‘John Adkins’ Farewell’ where he gives warning to other alcoholics in the same melodic strain.

From the above examples it would seem that the secular text contained often some hint which led the religious adapter in making his new poetic lines; and that the secular tune usually followed as a matter of course.

The comparison of tunes shed no actually new light on the age of the tunes. But it made clear the fact that the folk’s stock of melodies is assembled from divers times. The tunes of two songs in this collection, ‘New Orleans’, and ‘Hark my Soul’, have tonal trends strikingly similar to that of melodies found in the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries respectively. From the early seventeenth century we find ‘Mourner’s Lamentation’ which was in those earlier times ‘Wae is Me for Prince Charley’, a Jacobite song about Charles II of England. ‘Beggar’ is a 21 remake of ‘A-Begging We Will Go’ which has been traced back to 1611. ‘Captain Kidd’ or ‘Kidd’, as it is disguised in the fasola books, dates from the first part of the eighteenth century. It is significant that most of the tunes mentioned in the above paragraphs are comparatively modern in their musical aspects. This fact leads to the suspicion that the really old-sounding tunes, those in the antique modes—dorian, phrygian, and the like, especially in their gapped forms—originated in still earlier times. Here is an inviting field for the student of comparative folk-melodism.

I have been impressed, as I have come to know these tunes better, with their variety and beauty. They are believed, by the country folk who still sing them, to be “the most beautiful music on earth.” When I first heard this sweeping judgment I put it down as emanating from an understandable though extravagant zeal, one which was all the greater perhaps since the singers, mostly oldsters, felt they were fighting for the very life of a dying cause. But I now see I was mistaken. The songs are living vigorously without being fought for. The country folk clearly realized—however they may have expressed the realisation—that the “good old songs” were ingrained in their racial souls and that for this reason it was the most completely soul-satisfying of all music from whatever source.

If this was and still is the firm belief of those uncounted thousands who know and sing the country songs, those who are still carrying on the tradition for the sheer love of it and the joy they get out of it; then is there not an inspiration for us? Is that picture not an incentive to look into, to learn to know this tonal tradition, the chief one in our ethnic background? This quest might well lead to an examination of our other acquired, not inherited, musical concepts and judgments, in search for reasons why, in acquiring them, we have ignored the simpler art of the past. And from this approach we might open the question as to whether these reasons are valid,—wise or unwise.

American folk-music, basing squarely on that of the British Isles, is purer, I assert, and more completely representative of the peoples among whom it has developed, and less representative of individual creative activity than is the folk-music of other Western peoples. As evidence of this I present this collection, commending it to the serious consideration of those interested in fundamental phases of American culture.

This collection challenges, I feel, the attention also of those interested in the songs of the churches. Urban congregational singing depends on hymnals. Hymnals are made by successions of revision committees. These committees have been either hostile to, or incognisant of, American folk-hymns. The perusal of almost any protestant hymn-and-tune book will prove this. Thus we have the 22 strange anomaly: groups whose prime purpose is to induce more general singing by the masses, refusing recognition, in their books of songs, to the melodism of those masses and putting in its place the tonal products of individuals.

There are of late some exceptions to this attitude. In the Christian Science Hymnal, where one finds numerous folk-tunes from many other lands, there are two variants of melodies to be found in the present collection, that is, of ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Marion’. The editors found these tunes, however, not in America but in the British Isles.

The Methodists who were, as we have seen, originally largely responsible for the appearance of folk-tunes in the American religious environment, have for the past fifty years progressively eliminated them from their authorized hymnals. But their latest revised edition of 1935 indicates that this tendency has been checked. I find in that volume seven tunes which are identical with melodies in the present collection, namely, with ‘Green Fields’, ‘New Britain’, ‘Beloved’, ‘Nettleton’, ‘Friends of Freedom’, ‘Plenary’, and ‘Romish Lady’. There are also five other tunes in the Hymnal called “early American melodies” which I have not been able to identify as folk-melodies.

In England the evangelical protestant hymnal makers seem now to be folk-minded. The English Methodists, at least, have welcomed into their latest Hymn Book no less than 43 traditional folk-tunes of the British Isles. They have even used two tunes—‘Rhode Island’ and ‘Pisgah’—the latter of which appears in the present collection, and have called them “American”, even though one of them, ‘Pisgah’, came hither from England, as Miss Gilchrist has pointed out.

Then there are the folklorists. How will they greet this collection? My stressing of tunes and saying little about texts will be regarded by some of the old-line folklorists—especially those who still conceive all such material as “popular poetry”—with disapproval. Others, those who are sure that folk-song is dying out and therefore see the collector’s duty simply as that of retrieving the last bits of it, may greet the present collection as a new acquisition to the museums. Such a response would arouse in me no enthusiasm and little satisfaction; for I demur completely from narrow interpretations of the status, meaning, import, and destiny of folk-lore, folk-songs, these folk-songs. I do not participate in the pessimism of the folk-song fatalists.

The lore of a folk comprehends, as I understand it, the whole of its basic cultural accomplishments. Understood in this broadest and deepest sense, a folk-lore is truer, more vital and more significant than an art-lore. It is a clearer mirror of a people’s past, a more reliable interpreter of its present trends, and a safer prophet of its culture to come. It is all this because it is the body and soul of that culture, where art is merely a vestment. The art which fits best this body and soul, this basic ethnic character, is the best art. The art of ancient Greece was great for this reason. All students of esthetics since Lessing and Winckelmann have recognized this. They have recognized also that the great periods in the art of any enduring 23 people are those when its gifted creators are in closest harmony with the genius of their race; and that its barren periods are those when the masters have been faithless to their own and have sought afar “the good which lies so near.”

I wish to express here my deep gratitude to Mr. Hilton Rufty for his generous help in verifying the musical aspects of this collection and in helping me solve many a knotty problem in interpreting the tunes which I have transcribed from the old singing-school books. Mr. John Powell has earned my sincere thanks for reading critically the entire manuscript, calling my attention to a number of inaccuracies, and to many secular melodies related to those in this volume.

The present collection would have been far less comprehensive without the use of a number of unique source books placed at my disposal by friends. I wish therefore to acknowledge gratefully the co-operation of Mr. Will H. Ruebush for providing me with The Olive Leaf and The Social Harp; Mrs. Annabel Morris Buchanan for The Union Harmony (Hendrickson); Mr. E. S. Lorenz for The Revivalist and Songs of Grace; Mr. John Lair for the Scots Musical Museum; The Lawson McGhee Library (Knoxville, Tennessee) for The Church Harmony and The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony; Mr. W. E. Bird for The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist; and Miss Lucille Wilkin for The Western Harmony. The University of North Carolina Press has kindly allowed me to reproduce several songs from White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. For this I wish to express my sincere thanks.

I wish also to thank those who have furnished me with songs from oral tradition. Among such helpful contributors are Professor Donald Davidson, Mr. Don West, Mr. Samuel E. Asbury, Mr. Francis Arthur Robinson, and Miss Will Allen Dromgoole. My gratitude is hereby expressed also to Dr. Carleton Sprague Smith, Chief of the Music Division of the New York Public Library, and to Dr. Oliver Strunk, Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress for their helpfulness.

My daughter, Frances Helen Parker, and my sisters, Carol Jackson Ransom and Genevieve Jackson Beckwith, have given me invaluable help in preparing this book for the printer and in correcting the proofs. For this I am deeply and lastingly grateful to them.

George Pullen Jackson Vanderbilt University

Nashville, Tennessee, April 10, 1937

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The text—undoubtedly of Inquisition times origin—indicates the age of the ballad. It is to be found in the Roxburghe Ballads, i., 43. It is mentioned in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” (1613). A parody on the opening words:

is in Sandburg’s American Songbag, p. 11. Another echo of this ballad text is:

in ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’, Sharp, i., 159. I recorded the tune in Dayton, Virginia; see White Spirituals, 202. The Methodist Hymnal (1935, No. 436) has a variant of the tune which it calls a “traditional English carol”.

Heptatonic ionian, mode 3 A + b (I II III IV V VI VII)

A close tune variant is ‘Lost City’, or ‘To Glory I Will Go’ in this collection. Tune and words are a parody of ‘A-Begging We Will Go’ which was widely popular in the latter part of the seventeenth century and traces of whose existence are found as early as 1611.

See Chappell’s Old English Popular Music, ii., 42-43.

The first stanza of the song as it appeared in Choyce Ayres etc., 1676, runs:

Other songs for which the early song became the prototype were ‘A Bowling We Will Go’, ‘A Fishing We Will Go’, ‘A Hawking We Will Go’ and ‘A Hunting We Will Go.’

Hexatonic, mode 4 A (I II — IV V VI 7)

The Olive Leaf arranger spoiled the tune’s apparent mixolydian purity by changing the d’s to d-sharps. As to title and source the editor says: “Reverend James Axley was one of the pioneer preachers of the Holston Conference, and a very holy, laborious, and successful minister. I learned this tune and song of Reverend Russell Reneau, who died in Arkansas during our late unhappy Civil War. Crude as the song is, I choose to preserve it in memory of Mr. Axley and Mr. Reneau.” The tune is a variant of ‘Christian Warfare’, GOS 603. Further information as to the Reverend James Axley, whose period of activity in the methodist conferences of Tennessee, Kentucky and other states was during the first decades of the nineteenth century, may be found in Peter Cartwright’s Autobiography, p. 62 and elsewhere.

Pentatonic, mode 2 (I — 3 IV V — 7)

William Walker claims the tune. See ‘Farewell’ in this collection for different melodies associated with this text. Cecil Sharp recorded five versions of the song as he heard them in the Appalachian Mountains in 1916 and 1918. See Sharp, ii., 142-143. The text (given more fully under ‘Farewell’) was written by the Reverend B. Hicks of South Carolina. See White Spirituals, 202ff.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

Miss Gilchrist finds this “reminiscent of the old Cornish ‘When God at first had Adam made’, and of the style of the Manx-Gaelic carvals.” See JFSS, viii., 83.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The song is attributed in the Southern Harmony to Wm. M. Caudill and Wm. Walker. The tune bears some resemblance to ‘Liverpool’ in this collection. The song is found also in REV 396, entitled ‘Sonnet’.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The earliest appearance of the text is in Mercer’s Cluster, a collection of rurally used hymns (not tunes) by Jesse Mercer, benefactor of Mercer University, who lived in Powellton, Georgia, in the 1820’s. The editor of the Sacred Harp attributes the tune to M. C. H. Davis, a southern rural. The song is found also UH 27, HH 83, HOC 113, WP 36, SOC 76, SOH I and CHH 58. The tune is a member of the ‘Lord Lovel’ family mentioned in the introduction, p. 14, and is closely related to ‘Mermaid’, Sharp, i., 291, and to ‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’, SMM No. 3, and its seventeenth-century country-dance form ‘The Bonny Bonny Broome’, Playford’s The English Dancing Master, p. 74. For a list of other members of the ‘Lord Lovel’ tune family see ‘Dulcimer’ in this collection.

Pentatonic, mode 1 (I II — IV V VI —)

See White Spirituals for the full text of seven stanzas about the raising of Lazarus. For references see JAFL, xxv., 17, and xxix., 182.

Almost the same tune is ‘Johnny German’, Sharp, ii., 256. ‘Joe Bowers’, Cox, 527, is also similar. Another spiritual ballad using this tune in variant form is ‘Wedlock (A)’, in this collection.

Heptatonic ionian, Mode 3 A + b (I II III IV V VI VII)

The full text is reproduced in White Spirituals, 186f. The tune is closely related to ‘McAfee’s Confession’, Sharp, ii., 15 and 16. John Powell notes in connection with this song: “I have collected this tune often as ‘Young People Who Delight in Sin’ and it is always mixolydian.” He then makes the suggestion: “Why not take out the g-sharp from the signature? In that case the modal indication would be heptatonic mixolydian, mode 3 a + b (I II III IV V VI 7).”

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The song seems to have been inspired by the fate of one of the “forty-niners.” It made its first appearance in fasola circles in the 1859 edition of the Sacred Harp where it is attributed to Ball and Drinkard. For references as to its origin see Hudson, Folksongs of Mississippi, 221.

Hexatonic, mode 3 b (I II III IV V VI —)

John G. McCurry, compiler of the Social Harp, claims this song and dates it 1851. The tune is identical with that of ‘When Boys Go A-Courting’, Sharp, ii., 206. The “drunkard” theme may have been the textual source of ‘Way Up On Clinch Mountain’, where, to the same tune, the singer glories in his excesses including that of whiskey drinking. See Sandburg, 307. Miss Scarbrough has a negro adoption of the same tune in ‘Noble Skewball’; see On the Trail of the Negro Folk-Song, 63. An English folk-song ‘Sweet England’ has a variant tune. See English Folk-Songs for Schools, 46. For an Irish variant see Petrie, No. 1172. A Scotch variant is ‘My Ain Fireside’, Lyric Gems of Scotland, 186, which in turn borrowed its tune from ‘Todlen Hame’.

Heptatonic ionian, mode 3 A + b (I II III IV V VI VII)

The tune is practically the same as ‘Grenadier and the Lady’, JFSS, viii., 194.

Heptatonic ionian, mode 3 A + b (I II III IV V VI VII)

Another tune and additional stanzas of the text are given in this collection under the title ‘Wedlock (B)’. The song is attributed, in the Social Harp, to Henry F. Chandler and is dated 1854. The tunes of ‘Johnny German’, Sharp, ii., 256; ‘I Rode My Little Horse’, Baring-Gould, Songs of the West, No. 101; ‘The Auld 42 House’, Lyric Gems of Scotland, 49; and ‘Joe Bowers’, are similar to the above air. Another ballad in this collection using this tune in variant form is ‘Little Family’. Stephen Foster’s song ‘Virginia Belle’ leans melodically on ‘Wedlock (A)’. (See my article in The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2.)

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The compiler of Olive Leaf gives the following notes: “From McAnally’s Western Harp” and “Called after the late Wm. Patton, of Mo. Heard him sing it, first, at a camp-meeting, North Cove, Burk Co., N. C., in 1831 or 1832. Published by the admirable A. S. Hayden, perhaps in 1829.” The Celtic melodic influence is clearly felt in the above tune.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The Sacred Harp says this was “composed by H. S. Rees, 1859”. Is it perhaps a parody of Wm. Haines Lytle’s ‘I’m Dying, Egypt, Dying’? Lytle was a cousin of Stephen Collins Foster whose own song ‘For the Dear Old Flag I Die’ shows close kinship in words and tune to ‘Dying Boy’. (See my article in The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2.) There is a resemblance also between the ‘Dying Boy’ tune and a seventeenth century psalm tune called variously ‘Bella’, ‘Leeds’, ‘Needham’ and ‘Derby’; see Hymns Ancient and Modern, Historical ed., London, Clowes, 1909, p. 79.

Heptatonic ionian, mode 1 A + B (I II III IV V VI VII)

This song occurs also in Olive Leaf, p. 203, where it is called “a Scotch air”. Miss Gilchrist tells us, in the article often cited here, that ‘Saw Ye My Savior’ is ‘Saw Ye My Father’, or ‘The Grey Cock’, found in both Scotch and English versions. A text is in Herd’s collections of 1769 and 1772, and another with the tune, in Chappell’s Popular Music. Chappell’s version begins:

The melodic phrase above, which coincides with the text “Oh ... me”, is used to build up the tune for ‘Simple Ploughboy’, Sharp, i., 369. As to the influence of this impressive text on the crucifixion songs of the negroes, see White Spirituals, 277. Stephen Foster seems to have been influenced by the ‘Saw Ye My Savior’ tune or its secular relatives in composing his ‘Old Black Joe’. (See my article in The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2.) For further references as to ‘The Grey Cock’ see British Ballads from Maine, 310ff.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The Sacred Harp ascribes the song to John S. Terry and dates it 1869. Terry was a singing-school teacher of Georgia and later lived in Alabama. The singing-school teacher took for his warning song the ‘Lord Lovel’ tune type that has been used for many secular ballads. Among them are ‘Barbara Allen’, Sharp, i., 195, tune O; ‘Gypsy Laddie’, Sharp, i., 237, tune F; ‘Come all Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’, Sharp, ii., 135, tune P. For other tunes of the same type see ‘Dulcimer’ in this collection.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The text is attributed, by the 1911 editor of the Sacred Harp, to B. F. White, original compiler of that book. He wrote it “on the lone prairie in Texas”, while standing “at the grave of a friend who once lived in Georgia”. In Folksongs of Mississippi Hudson gives a variant text from oral tradition and tells of a local 48 legend as to its source which agrees in the main with that given in the Sacred Harp which book, I suspect, was the source of the Mississippi legend.

The tune, variously claimed in the fasola books, is identical with the ‘Braes o’ Balquhidder’. See Gilchrist, JFSS, viii., 77. Other derivatives of the same tune are ‘Sinner’s Invitation’, ‘Florence’, and ‘Orphan Girl’ in this collection. In The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2, I have shown the relationship between this tune and Stephen Foster’s ‘Linda Has Departed’.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The Cooper edition of the Sacred Harp gives the note: “Music by Eld. C. G. Keith, Nov. 1, 1906.” See Henry, JAFL, vl., 66f, for further references as to its occurrence. The tune is a derivative of ‘The Braes o’ Balquidder’. See ‘Lone Pilgrim’ for references to related tunes in this collection.

Heptatonic aeolian; mode 4 a + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7)

The author of the text is given as Wm. Hunter. The tune is a variant of ‘London Pride’, Sharp, Morris Dances, Set vii, No. 6. Its proper mode would seem to be dorian and its correct signature therefore one flat.

Pentatonic, mode 4 (I II — IV V — 7)

Tune attributed to J. M. Day, a Georgian. Doubt as to the correctness of this source is cast by the appearance of both tune and text in the Christian Lyre of 1830, No. 4. Variants are ‘Invocation’, GOS 67, and ‘Lord Revive Us’, PB 198. The Sacred Harp editor evidently looked upon this tune as one in a-minor, whereas it is probably a dorian melody with f-sharp as its tonic, and should have also a d-sharp in its key signature.

Heptatonic aeolian, mode 4 a + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7)

The tune was recorded, from oral tradition evidently, by William Caldwell (of eastern Tennessee) in the 1830’s. His source was doubtless some variant of ‘Banks of Inverary’. Cf. JFSS, viii., 198.

The unique opening melodic phrase is to be found also in ‘Young Beeham’ or ‘Ship’s Carpenter’, Cox 528. Another tune variant in the fasola environment is ‘Sons of Sorrow’, OSH 332.

Hexatonic, mode 4 A (I II — IV V VI 7)

The poem, given in full under ‘Converted Thief (B)’, is attributed to Stennett. William Moore of Tennessee, compiler of Columbian Harmony, lays claim to the tune, and probably did record it from oral sources. Found also SOH 9, OSH 44, GOS 140. The tune is a member of the ‘Hallelujah’ family. See the song with that title in this collection.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

The tune is a member of the ‘Roll Jordan’ family which is described under the song by that name in this collection. The ‘Tennessee’ tune’s resemblance to Foster’s ‘Susanna’ is evident. The melody, or some near relative of it, may well have furnished Foster with his inspiration in composing the latter. It had been sung widely in America for at least fifty years before the Pittsburgh composer published his minstrel song. (See the author’s article ‘Stephen Foster’s Debt to American Folk-Song’, The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2.)

That the ‘Tennessee’ tune was “unwritten music” in the South, and therefore free for all, is indicated by the many claimants to its authorship; Chapin, J. Robertson, L. P. Breedlove, William C. Davis, and William Walker were among them. In various forms and with different texts the tune is found also, CHI 84 (published in 1805), SKH 23, GCM 134, SOH 28, GOS 229, HOC 114, WP 96, TZ 94, SOC 78, SOC 81, SOC 145, SOH 105, OSH 501, SKH 23. The second part of the tune is similar to ‘Jamaica’, Sharp, Country Dances, Set IV, No. 12.

Hexatonic, mode 3 b (I II III IV V VI —)

The tune is attributed in the Harp of Columbia to W. Atchley. It belongs to what I have called (Introduction, p. 14) the ‘Hallelujah’ type of melody. See ‘Hallelujah’ for other related spiritual tunes. A secular song using the same melodic formula is ‘Virginia Lover’, Sharp, ii., 150. The text of ‘Farewell’ is recorded from oral tradition and reproduced from White Spirituals, 202. See ‘Hicks’ Farewell’ in this collection as to the authorship of the words.

Hexatonic mode 4, b (I II 3 IV V — 7)

For the full text and much data as to the source and occurrence of this song, see White Spirituals, 189-193. A tune variant is ‘Supplication’, in this collection. Another is ‘Lord Bateman’, Sharp One Hundred English Folksongs, No. 6.

Hexatonic, mode 1 A (I II III IV V VI —)

Recorded from singing of Miss Will Allen Dromgoole, Nashville, Tennessee, as she remembered it sung in 1890 by Mr. Tate, stage driver from Beersheba to Beersheba Springs on Cumberland Mountain in Tennessee. The unusual spelling is an attempt at reproducing the emphatic rhythmic pronunciation of Mr. Tate. The one stanza given above was all Miss Dromgoole remembered. The full text, however, was recorded by Mr. Fred Haun of Newport, Tennessee, from the singing of his mother, Mrs. Maggie Haun, and placed at my disposal by Miss Mildred Haun, his sister. This rather defective text is as follows:

Pentatonic, mode 1 (I II — IV V VI —)

The above homespun text points to the rural preacher or revival song leader of the late eighteenth century as its source. It is a conversion story in dramatic form, the Savior, the Sinner and the Devil having parts in the drama.

The earliest known occurrence of the tune is in the Vermont book, Ingalls’ Christian Harmony of 1805, p. 77. In the Sacred Harp of 1844, p. 89, it is found with a different text and is entitled ‘Church’s Desolation’. It is claimed there by J. T. White, and in the Christian Harmony of 1866, by William Walker. Both were South Carolinians, from which territory Reed Smith recorded the tune in 1913 as one of the ‘Barbara Allen’ settings; SCB 130. This tune was probably adopted for ‘Church’s Desolation’ and for the ‘Barbara Allen’ ballad from the Scotch ballad ‘Wae’s me for Prince Charlie’. See Kennedy’s Handbook of Scottish Song, p. 20. The London Era in the early 1860’s speaks of this as the “celebrated Jacobite song.” The ‘Prince Charlie’ of the song is Charles II of England. Hence the song, the text at least, is nearly 300 years old. The same tune is used also for ‘Geordie’, Last Leaves, p. 133; ‘Locks and Bolts’, Sharp, ii., 19; ‘Lazarus’, Sharp, ii., 30; an old Irish tune in Petrie, No. 363; ‘Johnny Fa’’, SMM, No. 62; and ‘Hynd Horn’, Motherwell, Appendix, Musick, No. 13.

The noted composer of hymn tunes, J. B. Dykes, was influenced by the ‘Prince Charlie’ melody in the building up of ‘Lindisfarne’; see Hymns Ancient and Modern, No. 156, second tune.

Hexatonic, mode 1 b (I II — IV V VI 7)

William Walker claims this song. See ‘Church’s Desolation’, a variant of the tune, for source references. See also ‘Sweet William and Lady Margery’ (Wyman and Brockway, p. 94) for a secular tune variant.

Hexatonic, mode 1 b (I II — IV V VI 7)

The words are attributed to Isaac Watts. I have supplied the second and third stanzas from The Olive Leaf, p. 129. The tune is from the eighteenth century; found also OSH 286, PB 38, HH 63, UHH 13. The tune’s frame is found with the text of ‘Good Morning, My Pretty Little Miss’, Sharp, ii., 90, also in ‘Ibby Damsel’, Sharp, ii., 137. I surmise that we have, in the last line of the second stanza above, the source of the negro spiritual refrain:

Pentatonic, mode 2 (I — 3 IV V — 7)

This tune is found also in GOS, No. 227. A remake is in OSH 176. It is ‘Banks of Sweet Dundee’, Sharp i., 399. Related also to ‘Pinery Boy’, Shoemaker, 262; and ‘Virginian Lover’, Sharp, ii., 150. The negro song ‘Sin-Sick Soul’, SS, No. 66, is based textually and melodically on the above song.

Hexatonic, mode 3 A (I II III — V VI VII)

B. F. White, compiler of the Sacred Harp, is given as the composer. It is dated 1842. The text is supplied from Good Old Songs, No. 154. A secular setting is ‘Three Crows’, Davis, p. 562, tune “P”. Both ‘Look Out’ and ‘Three Crows’ are adaptations of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, or ‘Bonnie Doon’, see Kennedy, Handbook of Scottish Song, p. 27. In Church Harmony, p. 134, we find the ‘Bonnie Doon’ tune in its original form under the little ‘Star of Bethlehem’. A variant tune in this collection is ‘’Tis a Wonder’.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The Sacred Harp gives but one stanza of this ballad. The rest of the text is to be found in Zion Songster. The tune is widely used among the secular ballads. See ‘Barbara Allen’, Sharp, i., 183; ‘Geordie’, Sharp, i., 240; ‘False Young Man’, Sharp, ii., 52; ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor’, Smith, 115; ‘True Lover’s Farewell’, Sharp, ii., 114; ‘Lizzie Wan’, Sharp, i., 89; and ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’, Sharp, i., 164 and 166.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The song is attributed in the Social Harp to Wm. C. Davis. The first stanza was evidently inspired by the lines in the traditional English ballad entitled ‘Giles Collins’, Sharp, i., 196, which reads:

Four recently recorded (1917 and 1918) variants of the ‘Newberry’ tune, with one stanza of text each are in Sharp, ii., 197f. See also JAFL, xxv., 276. ‘Lonesome Dove’, Thomas, 162, has the same text but a different tune. ‘Heavenly Dove’ in 65 this collection is a variant tune, but it is more closely related to the ‘Barbara Allen’ tune in Sharp, i., 183ff. ‘Newberry’ belongs to the ‘Lord Lovel’ type of tune mentioned in the Introduction, p. 14. Other melodies of the same type are listed under ‘Dulcimer’ in this collection.

Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)

The tune is found also UH 89, SOC 249, HOC 93, OSH 44. It is reminiscent of ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’, Sharp, i., 166; ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor’, Sharp, i., 118; and ‘O Land of Rest’ in this collection.

Hexatonic, mode 2 A (I II 3 IV V — 7)

This is evidently a marching tune and from the eighteenth century vintage. It occurs also OSH 153, SOC 216, HH 387. ‘Walking on the Levy’ (Newell, Games 67 and Songs of American Children, p. 231) has a similar beginning. Echoes of the text are found in Dett, p. 8:

Stephen Foster’s ‘Farewell My Lily Dear’ and ‘The Soldier’s Home’ show relationship to the tune. (See my article in The Musical Quarterly, vol. xxii., No. 2.) For the English source of this dialogue type of song, see the note under ‘Warrenton’ in this collection.

Heptatonic aeolian, mode 1 A + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7)

The tune seems dorian in character. If so classed, the key signature should be natural. A variant of tune and text is in CHI 30 and SWP 69.

Pentatonic, mode 2 (I — 3 IV V — 7)

Further stanzas are made merely by the substitution of “mother” etc. for “father”. The song, tune and words, was probably parodied from ‘Seven Long Years’. See Sharp, ii., 79. From the latter song I quote the second stanza.

Compare also ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor’, Sharp, i., 124, tune ‘N’. ‘Marion’ belongs to the ‘Babe of Bethlehem’ group of tunes. See the song by that title in this collection. ‘Kingsfold’, No. 270 in the Christian Science Hymnal is the same. In the English Methodist Hymn Book, ‘Kingsfold’ is given as a traditional melody of England. See also Petrie, Nos. 193 and 863.

Heptatonic aeolian, mode 2 A + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7)