For Dulcimer: Gospel Hits of 1830s?

From the November 2005 issue of The Prairie Picayune, the interpreters' newsletter at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic SIte, Route 1, Petersburg, Illinois.

The first time I sang with the New Salem Shape Note Singers in the historic village nearly 10 years ago, we sang a tune attributed to the Rev. Peter Cartwright [a 19th-century circuit rider from nearby Pleasant Plains, Illinois]. We were strolling in front of Sam Hill’s grocery store, where Cartwright used to hang out, and it was like hearing something ancient and unbridled brought back to life.

The song is called “Hebrew Children,”and it goes like this:

Where are the Hebrew children? (repeat twice)
Safe in the promised land.
Tho’ the furnace flamed around them,
God while in their troubles found them,
He with love and mercy bound them,
Safe in the promised land.

It’s an old camp meeting song, anonymous words set to a modal Anglo-Celtic melody in the same tune family, as New Salem singer Berkley Moore likes to remind us, as the sea shanty “What will we do with the drunken sailor.” It isn’t quite in a minor key, and it isn’t quite major. But it’s clearly one of the haunting old modal tunes that got handed around in southern Appalachian oral tradition.

“It is one of the old melodies of America, and has a long time been a favorite of many of the older people in their younger days who are now living,” said Joe S. James, editor of the 1911 edition of The Sacred Harp. “Peter Cartwright was a minister of the gospel, and used this song in his camp meetings long before it was ever placed in notation.”

James was an old-fashioned country lawyer with a love of history, and his 1911 footnotes preserve a great deal of musical lore that otherwise would be lost to us. So I’m convinced Cartwright really led “Hebrew Children” in his camp meetings, and James heard about it from an oral tradition.

In November the New Salem singers will join Sacred Harp singers from Charleston and the nearby Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site in a singing at the fall conference of the Midwest Outdoor Museums Coordinating Council. I’ll be presenting a paper there, too, and working on the paper got me to thinking about our music at New Salem. [The paper was later made available on line in my faculty website at Springfield College/Benedictine University.]

Several of our songs have strong local connections. We like to mention those connections to visitors when we sing them, and I thought they might interest readers of The Prairie Picayune as well.

In her 1922 history of Rock Creek Presbyterian Church, Alice Keach Bone describes how at camp meetings the Rev. John M. Berry “would give out the hymn, read it, line it, and, in a strong voice, lead the singing himself, the people joining in one after another.” She recalled singing “On Jordan's stormy banks I stand” and “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,” both favorite 19th-century hymns, and she quotes at length from “There is a fountain filled with blood.”

Laura Isabell Osburn Nance, also a daughter of old settlers, recalled singing “How firm a foundation” at Rock Creek, along with several camp meeting songs with floating verses and “Old Hundred,” probably ending with the Doxology “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.” Edgar Lee Masters, the poet, recalled “There is a fountain” and “I will arise and go to Jesus” at Concord Cumberland Presbyterian Church in the late 1800s.

There’s one more song I’ve got to mention! At Springfield’s first public hanging in 1826 the defendant, who was from Athens, sang all the verses of a text by Isaac Watts that begins, “Hark! From the tombs a doleful sound, / Mine ears attend the cry.” We sing it in The Sacred Harp to the same tune as “Auld Lang Syne.”

So from this can we reconstruct a playlist? Chart the top gospel hits of the 1830s? Not really. Our sources are too fragmentary for that. But when we sing the old songs, often we’ll notice visitors joining in with us. Songs like “How firm a foundation” and “There is a fountain” were favorites then, and they’re still favorites now.

Music for “Hebrew Children” is available on line in copyright-free GIF files in the online Southern Harmony (facsimile of the 1853 edition) maintained by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. It’s in three-part harmony with the melody in the tenor (middle) line. To play it on a dulcimer, tune to DAA or DAC (I prefer DAA but DAC brings out the modal sound) and start playing on the fifth fret. I’ve tabbed it out. Contact me by e-mail if you want a copy.