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_Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America_
Two Hundred and Fifty Tunes and Texts With an Introduction and Notes
Collected and Edited by GEORGE PULLEN JACKSON
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC. NEW YORK
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_
Preface
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:
1. Alas! how should I sing, yloren is my playinge. How should I with that olde man, Sweetest of all, singe, Leven and let my leman. Sweetest of all, singe.
2. Have mercy on me, frere, barefoot that I go.
3. Do, do, nightingale, syng ful mery Shall I never for thine love longer kary.
4. Have good day, my leman _etc._
5. Gaveth me no garland of greene, But it ben of wythones (withies--wyllowes?) yrought.
6. Hey, how the chevaldoures woke all night."
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:
John, come kiss me now, John, come kiss me now, John, come kiss me by and by, And make nae mair ado.
The Lord thy God I am, That John does thee call: John represents man By grace celestial.
For John Goddis grace it is, Who list till expone the same: O John, thou did amiss When that thou lost this name.
My prophets call, my preachers cry John, come kiss me now John, come kiss me by and by And make nae mair ado.
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 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 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
Table of Contents
Preface vii Introduction 1 _Recent Trends in Song Search_ 2 _Varieties of Religious Songs_ 4 Religious Ballads Folk-Hymns Revival Spiritual Songs _Folk-Song Collectors of Yore_ 10 _Features of American Folk-Tunes_ 12 Tonal Trends, Tune Families Metrical Patterns Scales, Modes Rufty's Classification, Chart of Tunes _Tunes of Religious and Worldly Folk-Songs Compared_ 17 _Conclusion_ 21 _Acknowledgments_ 23 Fifty-one Religious Ballads 27 Ninety-eight Folk-Hymns 87 One Hundred and one Revival Spiritual Songs 169 Bibliography 241 List of Abbreviations of Titles 245 Index of Songs by Titles 246 Index of First Lines of Texts 250
Illustrations
1. Typical country singers of early American spiritual folk-songs Frontispiece 2. The "big singings" take place at county seats and in even larger centers Frontispiece 3. "Dinner on the grounds" xii 4. Classification chart of tunes facing page 16 5. The Original Sacred Harp, 1911 edition 24 6. The sole occurrence of 'The Babe of Bethlehem' 26 7. The 'Morning Trumpet' in seven-shape notation 26 8. Benjamin Franklin White, and Thurza Golightly White, of Hamilton, Georgia 86 9. The White memorial in Atlanta 86 10. The Sacred Harp appeared in 1844 86 11. The Southern Harmony, 1835 166 12. William (Singin' Billy) Walker, of Spartanburg, South Carolina 168 13. William Walker's grave in Spartanburg, South Carolina 168
Introduction
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 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.
_Recent Trends in Song Search_
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.