Part 2

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; 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.

_Varieties of Religious Songs_

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 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_.

Religious Ballads

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.

Folk-Hymns

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 of the Methodist movement) four-fifths of the adherents to this sect were to be found in that section.[3]

Revival Spiritual Songs

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

Found a horse-shoe, found a horse-shoe, Found a horse-shoe, just now; Just now found a horse-shoe, Found a horse-shoe just now

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:

On Jordan's stormy banks I stand And cast a wishful eye, To Canaan's fair and happy land Where my possessions lie. _Chorus_ I'm bound for the promised land, I'm bound for the promised land; O who will come and go with me? I'm bound for the promised land.

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:

O when shall I see Jesus And dwell with him above, _And shall hear the trumpet sound_ _In that morning._ And from the flowing fountain Drink everlasting love, _And shall hear the trumpet sound_ _In that morning_.

Then came the chorus:

_Shout O glory_ _For I shall meet above the skies_ _And shall hear the trumpet sound_ _In that morning._

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:

Oh, brother, in that day We'll take wings and fly away, _And we'll hear the trumpet sound_ _In that morning._ Oh, sister, in that day We'll take _etc._

Oh, preachers, in that day,

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:

Where are the Hebrew Children, Where are the Hebrew Children, Where are the Hebrew Children? _Safe in the promised land._

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.

Folk-Song Collectors of Yore

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 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, 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.

_Features of American Folk-Tunes_

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.