One of New Salem’s enduring legends has to do with The Missouri Harmony, a shape-note tunebook belonging to the Rutledge family. In his American Songbag, the poet Carl Sandburg’s said, “Young Abraham Lincoln and his sweetheart Ann Rutledge sang from the book in the Rutledge tavern in New Salem, Illinois, according to old settlers there.” Early 20th-century local historian Josephine Craven Chandler recalled “stories of Sunday evenings when the family sang in unison and he turned for her by fire and candle light the worn pages of the ‘Missouri Harmony Songbook’; and, it is told, she sang for him alone sometimes in her clear, strong, girlish voice.”
As it so often happens, there’s at least a kernel of truth to the legend. And as it sometimes also happens, the truth is more interesting than the legend.
We can confirm from other sources that young Abraham Lincoln did in fact sing from Missouri Harmony with the Rutledge youngsters. We even know a song he enjoyed singing. After a fashion, at least. Lincoln had a terrible voice, and he made a mess of the song, but sing it he did. Robert Rutledge, Ann's brother, said he’d “tip back his chair and roar it out at the top of his voice, over and over again, just for fun.” The racket was so loud it bothered little Sally, the youngest of the Rutledge children.
The song is called “Legacy.” It was an Irish jig tune, related to “St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning” and an English morris dance tune called “Constant Billy” as well as a Scottish song called “How Shall We Abstain from Whisky?” The Irish poet Thomas Moore set a poem to it called “The Legacy,” and his version of it got into Missouri Harmony and other songbooks of the day with that title. What’s more, there’s some evidence the song got into the oral tradition in west central Illinois, at least for a while, as a fiddle tune that John Armstrong and Lee Edgar Masters called “Missouri Harmony.”
Masters heard it in 1914, when he visited John Armstrong in Oakford. In a novel, Masters also wrote of its being played on an Illinois River steamboat. Fiddle playing often runs in families, and the Armstrongs were one of Menard County’s noted fiddle-playing families. John’s father, Jack, was the same Jack Armstrong who got in the famous wrestling match with Lincoln at New Salem.
And Lee Masters listened spellbound for several hours as.“John tuned his fiddle, and sat back and began to preface the playing of each piece with some story concerning its origin, and where and how it got its name, and where he heard it first.”
“For years [Armstrong] had attended the dances, the county fairs, the camp meetings, the festivals,” Masters continued. “There were the continuation of the New Salem events, and I felt that he was re-creating the past of the deserted village for me. I could imagine myself in the Rutledge Tavern, listening to John Armstrong tell stories of the Sangamon River, of Bowling Green, of Mentor Graham whom he knew, of William G. Greene, at the time not so many years gone from earth.”
Some of the songs Armstrong played that night were standard fiddle tunes like “Hell Amongst the Yearlings and “The Wind that Shakes the Barley.” Then, Masters added, “[Armstrong] played and sang ‘The Missouri Harmony’.” Masters quoted two stanzas:
“When in death I shall calm recline,Masters didn’t mention the connection, but it was the same song that Lincoln sang with the Rutledge youngsters. It’s not only in Missouri Harmony but Moore’s poem and a close variant of the tune also got into The Southern Harmony, a very popular shape-note tunebook of the 1830s that has the added advantage for us today of having a copyright-free version available on line. It’s indexed in the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at http://www.ccel.org/s/southern_harmony/ …click on “L” and then on “Legacy.” There you’ll find the music – the melody is in the tenor, or middle, line – and a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file. If you play by ear, like I do, you can learn it from the MIDI file.
O bear my heart to my mistress dear;
Tell her it lived upon smiles and wine
Of the brightest hue, while it lingered here.
“Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow,
To sully a heart so brilliant and light;
But balmy drops of the red grape borrow,
To bathe the relic from morn to night.”
A couple of suggestions as you’re learning the tune. If you read music, you can ignore the shapes. Just read the middle line for the time values and intervals. It’s written in the key of F, but if you play the keynote (the triangular note at the beginning and end that shape-note singers recognize as “fa”) on the third fret and work out the other intervals in DAA tuning, you’ll automatically transpose it to D. Sometimes I’ll make homemade tablature by writing fret numbers above the notes. I don’t play from tab at New Salem. It’s not appropriate to our period. But it is a good way of working out a new tune.
No matter whether you call it “Legacy” or “Missouri Harmony,” it’s a nice tune. It’s in 6/8 time, and I play it on the dulcimer with the lilt of a jig but slow enough to sing the lyrics to. When I play the song at New Salem, I feel like in a small way I’m helping re-create the past of no-longer deserted village.
A footnote. I would appreciate information or leads that can help me learn more about fiddle playing and old-time string bands in west central Illinois, especially Menard and Sangamon counties. Please contact me at pellertsen@sci.edu.
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