This morning I taught "Again Thy Glorious Sun Doth Rise" (Din Klara Sol Går Åter Upp) from the Augustana Synod's 1901 hymnal and Dillner's Melodier (1830) at Colona United Methodist Church in the Quad-Cities. Hat tip to my sister-in-law Marian's husband Phil Paulson of LeClaire, Iowa, for recording it and sharing it on Facebook. Link here to the video on my FB page:
I like the way my re-enactment of a 19th-century Swedish pastor's singing school is jelling, although I definitely need to work on bowing and the whole presentation could use a little more polish! I think my audiences -- congregations -- do learn the song by the repetition that comes when I (a) play the melody on the psalmodikon, (b) lead the congregation in singing the sifferskrift numbers, and (c) lead them in singing all four verses from the English hymnal. Most of them seem to enjoy it.
For convenient reference, here's the hymn in sifferskrift, Dillner's numerical psalmodikon tablature:
The numbers reflect degrees of the scale: 1 = do, 2 = re, 3 = mi and so on up through 8 = do' at the octave.
OK, OK, this is a music blog (mostly), and this post has nothing to do with music.
But this morning I was on Facebook, and the subject of Girdwood, Alaska, came up. Girdwood is about an hour's drive east of Anchorage, and I used to go out there when Debi was busy with Alaska Domestic Violence Network meetings in town. I'd eat lunch at a little restaurant called the Bake Shop and head a few miles farther down the Seward Highway to the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center, where I'd spend an hour or two before heading back to Anchorage.
Other times, Debi and I would head out in the morning. The Seward Highway follows the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet out of Anchorage, and the scenery looks like fjord country in Norway. It's magnificent. Then we'd stop at the Bake Shop for a bowl of soup, which was also magnificent, before visiting the wildlife center.
Anyway, when I Googled up the Bake Shop today, I noticed it is now posting some of its recipes.
Among them:
Great Northern Bean with Andouille Sausage, Tomato Basil, Beef Barley Vegetable Soup, Szegedin Goulash (named after a district in Hungary where they grow paprika) and a vegan African Ground Nut Stew. Also Potato Salad, Chicken Salad and a variety of baked goods.
Composer John Victor Bergquist was head of the Augustana College music department and leader of the Handel Oratorio Society and Wennerberg chorus from 1912 to 1918. One of Bergquist’s original compositions, Golgatha, was performed by the Handel Oratorio Society with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1915. Also in 1915, Bergquist, along with Dr. E.W. Olson, was commissioned by the Augustana Synod to compose a piece, the Reformation Cantata, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. This piece was performed in 1917 in Rock Island, Illinois, by a 400-member chorus and the Tri-City Orchestra.
Sources: Bergendoff, Conrad. Augustana… A Profession of Faith: A History of Augustana College, 1860-1935. Rock Island, IL: Augustana College Library, 1969.
Laudon, Robert Tallant. “J. Victor Bergquist: Finding Joy in Music.” Minnesota Musicians of the Cultured Generation. Minneapolis: University of Michigan, 2002.
Bergquist wrote a series of articles for The Lutheran Companion, Nov. 1916-Jan. 1917, on the synod's Reformation heritage:
11 Nov. 1916. Intro by editorial staff, pp. 1-2; Part I [not numbered] by Bergquist, p. 7.
18 Nov. 1916. Part II, p. 8.
25 Nov. 1916. Part III, p. 6.
9 Dec. 1916. Part IV, p. 8.
16 Dec. Part V, p. 8.
6 Jan. 1917, p. 8. Part VI.
13 Jan. 1917, p. 19. Part VII.
27 Jan. 1917, p. 44. Part VII (sic).
[Beginning in January 1917, pages were numbered consecutively; prior to that, each issue was paginated separately.]
Gerberding, George Henry
(August 21, 1847–March 27, 1927). B. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; educ. Thiel Coll. and Muhlenberg Coll. (see Ministry, Education of, VIII A 7, 11); ordained 1876; pastor and miss. in Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Dakota; founder and 1st pres. Syn. of the Northwest, pres. Chicago Syn. (see United Lutheran Church, Synods of, 20, 8); prof. Chicago Luth. Sem. and Northwestern Luth. Sem. (see Ministry, Education of, XI B 6, 10). Works include The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church; Life and Letters of W. A. Passavant, DD ...
Text: Paul Gerhardt 1653 (46 år) "Nun ruhen alle Wälder", sv. övers. Haqvin Spegel 1686 (41 år) "Nu vilar hela jorden", bearb. och nyövers. Britt G Hallqvist 1978 (64 år)
Musik: Heinrich Isaac o 1500 (50 år) "Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen", jfr 1697 års koralbok nr 375 och 1820 års koralbok nr 433
[Av upphovsrättsliga skäl kan resten av texten inte publiceras här än]
Oscar Lövgren skriver (i Psalm- och sånglexikon, Gummessons 1964, sp. 231) att Gerhardts psalm är "vår bildrikaste och kanske mest berömda aftonpsalm." Det senare äger nog inte längre sin riktighet, men det förra stämmer nog, dels p.g.a. psalmens längd (hela nio verser) och dels p.g.a. att nästan varje vers innehåller en natur- eller kroppsbeskrivning följd av en andlig, bildlig tillämpning.
Psalmens längd har dock gjort att den i vår "bråttomtid" sällan sjungs (även om tiden det tar att sjunga den bara är en bråkdel av den tid det tar att följa en dokusåpa eller "Morden i Midsomer"). Mest berömd är den väl för att anslaget påståtts strida mot jordens klotformighet, varför också Britt G Hallvist i sin slutliga version av psalmen undvek påståendet att "alla skogar" eller "hela jorden" vilar. I hennes tidigare, mer originaltrogna, översättning började psalmen dock så här:
Nu vilar alla skogar,
djur, mänskor, fält och plogar,
all världen slumrar in.
Men du, min själ, skall börja
din andakt, du skall spörja
vad som behagar Skaparn din.
Man måste väl dock säga att versionen i 1986 års psalmbok känns mer lättflytande. Det har dock inte hjälpt upp psalmens popularitet nämnvärt. Man måste väl erkänna att den, som så många psalmer från den tid då psalmboken inte användes bara i kyrkan, verkar mer skriven för den enskilda kvällsandakten än för offentliga sammankomster ("Till sömn jag mig bereder, / tar av mig skor och kläder"), men jag har en känsla av att den inte heller i det privata sammanhanget längre har någon stark ställning. De fyra sista stroferna passar dock utmärkt väl att sjunga som avslutning på t.ex. kvällsmässor, och så trött är man nog sällan att man inte skulle orka be dem hemma inför sänggåendet ("när mina tankar domnar / och alla sinnen somnar").
Nu vilar hela jorden · Mats Bergström. Guitar. Julsånger utan ord.
℗ 2012 Naxos Sweden
Nu vilar hela jorden · Peter Mattei
℗ 2011 Ladybird Production
Released on: 2011-04-01
Artist: Peter Mattei
Conductor: Gustaf Sjokvist
Orchestra: Stockholm Sinfonietta
Composer: Heinrich Isaac
Composer: Jan Sandstrom
Auto-generated by YouTube.
Music
"Nu Vilar Hela Jorden (Arr. J. Sandstrom)" by Heinrich Isaac
186 Nu vilar folk och länder -- 1986 års psalmbok som melodipsalmbok på nätet
Our next slow jam and song learning session of the Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music is from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, Aug. 1, in the barn at Clayville Historic Site, Ill. 125, Pleasant Plains. One tune I want to feature is "Over the Waterfall." We used to play it, but we haven't been lately. It's too good a tune to lose, though, so I want to start Saturday's session by refreshing our memory -- and introducing it for the folks who have joined us recently.
"Over the Waterfall" is in Stephen Siefert's Join the Jam, with a lead sheet in standard musical notation, backup chords and tab for a dulcimer tuned in DAD ... all the more reason to go ahead and get Steve's book. You can order it on his website at http://www.stephenseifert.com/ (click on "Physical Store" in the ribbon at the left of his start page, and follow the links).
If you don't have Steve's book and want to play the melody on a mountain dulcimer, there's tab available on the Three Rivers Dulcimer Society website in Washington state at:
I think the tune Mixolydian, but I've been accused of going overboard on the modes. Most people say D major.
There's a C natural toward the end of the A part that gives the tune a slightly darker Mixolydian feel, just for a moment there, but the folks on the Session website, whom I consider authoritative on questions like this, classify the tune as D major.
A couple of YouTube clips:
Uploaded by YouTube user Jim Pankey, who writes: "Christie Burns, Jim Pankey and Roy Curry playing tunes on the porch! :)" I don't know who these people are, but I like the way they swing this tune!
A more traditional old-time string band arrangement by Redwing, of Eugene, Oregon. "Redwing is a five-piece string band, based in Eugene, Oregon. They play old time and Celtic tunes. This was filmed at Belknap Hot Springs Resort, on the McKenzie River in Oregon."
OVER THE WATERFALL. AKA and see "The Fellow/Feller That Looks Like Me," "Punkin Head." Old‑Time, Breakdown. USA, Virginia. D Major. Standard tuning. AB (Silberberg): AABB (most versions). Originally from fiddler Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, it was learned from directly from Reed and popularized in modern times by folklorist and fiddler Alan Jabbour. Reed himself may have learned it from hearing it emanating from a steam-driven calliope. "Over the Waterfall" is a melody that is fairly wide-spread throughout the British Isles and North America, explains Jabbour, and was used both for a well-known British-American song sometimes called "Eggs and Marrowbones" (AKA “Old Woman from Wexford,” “Old Woman in Dover,” “Wily Auld Carle” etc.) and as an instrumental tune. Comparison with “The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue [2]” in O’Neill’s Music of Ireland (1903) reveals a striking similarity between the two, and it is possible “Over the Waterfall” was adapted from an Irish source. Others have suggested that it may originally have been a composed piece from the turn of the century that was spread by travelling‑circus and riverboat musicians.
***
The earliest recorded version was by Al Hopkins and the Bucklebusters in the very last years of the 1920’s, who recorded it on a 78 RPM as “The Fellow that Looks Like Me” (Brunswick 184). “The Fellow that Looks Like Me” that was in the repertoire of Virginia fiddler Stuart Lundy (son of Galax fiddler Emmett Lundy) under that title, as well as the aforementioned Bucklebusters. Lundy died in the late 1970’s. The Hopkins family (Al is referenced above) was also originally from Galax. The Reed version of “Over the Waterfall” has become very common among old‑time fiddlers (indeed, it has become hackneyed), though is now usually regarded as a beginner's tune. Kentucky fiddler J.P. Fraley plays the tune, learned from the fiddling of his father, a somewhat more melodically complicated version. ...
Korsbaneret: Kristlig Kalendar för 1880. [Banner of the Cross: Christian Calendar for 1880] Chicago: Enander & Bohmans Förlag, 1879.
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/011254985
Pix on page 44 and poem on page 45.
xxx
There is also a history of the church in Andover --
"Svenska Evangeliska Församlingen i Andover," Korsbaneret: Kristlig Kalendar för 1880 (Chicago: Enander & Bohmans Förlag), pp.
60-119.
Hat tip to Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet (NPsF) and my sister-in-law Marian Edmund-Paulson for telling me about this guy. He plays the psalmodikon with some the drive and rhythm of Swedish folk music, and it reminds me of the Hardanger fiddles I first heard as a student in Oslo. --
A new member of Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet, the Swedish psalmodikon players' association has posted a YouTube clip, a photo and a SoundCloud audio clip of a kvällsvisa (night song) and a stev (*a simple four-line melody -- see note below) on the psalmodikon to NpSF's Facebook page at:
His name is Gunnar F, and he also plays the nyckelharpa or Swedish keyed fiddle (in fact it appears that it's his primary instrument). And his attack -- the way he hits the downbeat -- gives his playing a lilt, or rhythmic quality, that I'm not used to hearing on the psalmodikon.
It's fascinating, I love hearing it and I want to study it.
So, Gunnar F, if you ever happen to read this: I hope you post more psalmodikon videos to YouTube!
In the meantime, here's his Stev for Psalmodikon on YouTube:
Psalmodikon med Gunnar F. He writes: "Psalmodikon var ett instrument vi växte upp med. Men det var länge sedan …" (trans.: the psalmodikon was an instrument we grew up with. It was a long time ago).
Equally as interesting is a picture that Gunnar F sent the Psalmodikonförbundet. It shows a turn-of-the-century band with a psalmodikon from Jämtland, a district in north central Sweden next to the Norwegian border and not too far east of Trondheim.
It's quite a band! I see a cornet, an accordion, a fiddle, cymbals, what appears to be a small zither (a Finnish kantele, maybe?) and a psalmodikon that's unlike any I've seen before.
Folk psalmodikon with sympathetic strings?
The psalmodikon is held by the woman wearing a headscarf, third from the left in the back row of the picture at the right of the page below, which is a screen grab from NPsF's Facebook page. To enlarge it, go to NPsF's Facebook post and click on the picture. (While you're there, BTW, why don't you click on "Like?" They're doing a lot to revive interest in the psalmodikon.) It's the boxy instrument held by the woman in the back row, third from the left, and it's identified in the cutlines as a jämtländskt psalmodikon. It looks like she played it with a standard violin bow.
I'll leave it to the experts whether this Jämtland psalmodikon is technically a zither or a lute. (A zither is the word the experts use for any stringed instrument without a neck, and a lute is any instrument with a neck, including but not limited to lutes.). If I had to guess, I'd say it's some kind of hybrid. But I think it's clearly a folk instrument.
And it looks like it has sympathetic strings. The Swedes call them resonanssträngar, and I did a fair amount of research on them when I had my copy made of the Rev. Lars Paul Esbjörn's psalmodikon at the Jenny Lind Chapel museum in Andover. (Pictures are available on the Jenny Lind Chapel website -- click on "Flickr" link and open directory of Psalmodikon pictures.)
As near as I can tell, the psalmodikon in Gunnar F's picture has a melody string stretched from a tuning peg at the top of the neck to a bridge toward the bottom of the soundbox. The fretboard is marked with the same white- and dark-colored pattern of whole steps and half steps as other psalmodikons. I count 12 sympathetic strings or resonanssträngar, stretched over the soundbox. I don't think it would be possible to bow any of them, but if they were tuned to the 12 tones of a chromatic scale, they would vibrate sympathetically in unison with whatever note was being bowed on the melody string.
To sum it up in a word or two, the Jämtland psalmodikon in the picture is musically a sophisticated instrument. And look at the detail in the soundhole carved in the shape of a lyre! This is an instrument that clearly has developed considerably from the simple wooden monochord that Johann Dillner described. I think it became more elaborate, both musically and esthetically, by a folk process.
When I was a kid, the psalmodikon was still a natural, common, instrument in some parts of the country, amongst elderly people. Since then it has almost disappeared and most swedes don´t even know what it is. I found out there is an association, Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet www.npsalmodikonforbundet.se
and through them I could buy me an instrument.
The picture is of me and my mother.
The first one is not exactly as my mother wrote it. The other is a so called nystev from southern Norway.
As the directory at https://soundcloud.com/gunnar-fredelius makes clear, Gunnar F is an accomplished nyckelharpa player with a deep interest in the older strains of Scandinavian traditional music. What I've heard of his music is modal and rhythmic, and it reminds me of the traditional Norwegian music I enjoyed so much when I heard it played on the Hardanger fiddle in summer school at the University of Oslo. I suspect that some of the pietist Swedish-American pastors I'm writing about now might not appreciate his music, but I plan to keep coming back to it -- there's a lot I can learn by listening to him.
So, Gunnar F, if you're reading this, please keep posting your music to the internet.
__________
* Footnote. A stev, according to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stev, is a simple "folk song consisting of four line lyric stanzas." It's similar to English ballad measure, or the Common Meter of traditional Anglo-American hymnody. I'm most familiar with them in Norwegian folk music, where they're associated with simple melodies called kvedar. Link here for an arrangement of Kirsten Bråten Berg's Min Kvedarlund (my grove, or garden, of kvedar), the title song from her 1993 album of that name), along with some more background on Norwegian stev melodies and kvedar.
According to Setesdalswiki at http://www.setesdalswiki.no/wiki/Min_kvedarlund, "Min Kvedarlund" is a compilation of "bånsullar [lullabies] og småviser [little songs] etter T. Liestøl, Ingebjørg Liestøl, Jorunn Nomeland, Svein Hovden og Gro Faremo." Setesdalwiki is a local crowd-sourced website for the Setesdal region on the southern coast of Norway.
Text of a letter I just submitted to the Hon. Bruce Rauner, governor of Illinois:
Recently I wrote urging you not to close the Illinois State Museum, and I got this message back: “I appreciate you taking the time to reach out to my office about bobcat hunting in Illinois. … Please know I value your opinion and thank you for sharing it with me. Hearing from people in Illinois gives me a better idea of what is impacting local communities across the state. Knowing those opinions helps me make decisions for you in Springfield.”
I guess it’s nice to hear you say you value my opinion and it helps you make decisions about my local community, but I wasn’t talking about bobcat hunting. I wrote to tell you that closing the State Museum will damage our reputation in the international scientific community.
So, since apparently no one on your staff bothered to read my first letter, I will try again: DO NOT, repeat NOT, CLOSE the ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM, repeat ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM. If you do, it will make further research on artifacts in the museum collection, including a juvenile bobcat skeleton found in a Hopewell culture burial site, inaccessible to scientists worldwide, including the anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany whom I referenced in my first letter. If you close the museum, it will look like a CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, repeat CHEAP POLITICAL STUNT, retaliating against a community that voted against you in last year’s Republican gubernatorial primary. And I know you wouldn’t want to give anybody that impression.
For background, including my original letter and a screen grab of Governor Rauner's full response, see post immediately below dated July 15 --
I suspect that the original, in which I discussed the bobcat skeleton at some length (for such a short letter), was run through word recognition software in the governor's office and the form letter for the bobcat bill was assigned to me on the basis of a word frequency count. Hence my repetitions in the second message.
Just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know how much your opinion is valued!
Last week I wrote Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner in opposition to his plans to close the Illinois State Museum. Today I got back this message:
That puzzled me at first, but then I looked up the letter -- a form that I sent to the governor's office and members of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, who review plans to close state facilities. It said:
According to a July 2 article on the Daily News website of Science magazine, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Angela Perri, zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, hypothesizes that animal bones from a Hopewell burial site now housed at the State Museum in Springfield belonged to young bobcat which was buried with a shell bead necklace around its neck. “This is the closest you can get to finding taming in the archaeological record,” she told David Grimm, online editor of the AAAS magazine. Perri suggests that the necklace may have been a collar, and the animal may have been “a cherished pet” that was orphaned, adopted by human beings and nurtured as a small kitten. If this hypothesis can be proven, it would be important evidence of how wild animals were domesticated. However, Governor Rauner’s budget threatens that possibility.
“Unfortunately, further work on the bobcat may not be possible,” said Grimm of the AAAS. “The museum where the bones are housed is facing a shutdown due to state budget cuts, and Perri says she can no longer access the samples.”
Dr. Perry is not the only scientist who has made use of the State Musuem. Rainer Schreg, professor of pre- and early history (Ur- und Frühgeschichte) at Heidelberg University in Germany, visited an archaeological dig in Pike County in 2010 and presented a paper on his work in Germany while he was here. Dr. Schreg said recently, the museum “makes an important and multi-faceted public contribution, which is closely linked to research that is fundamental to the understanding of history and landscape in the Midwest. It is nonsense [Blödsinn] to cancel something like this." (My translation.) Science depends on the free exchange of information among scholars worldwide, and closing this museum at this time would cut off an avenue for our archaeologists and historians to exchange ideas with their peers. It would also, as Dr. Schreg suggests, damage our reputation worldwide.
We have heard plenty about the State Museum’s economic impact and its educational value, both for family groups who visit during school vacations and for students who tour Springfield during the spring. And it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of these things. But the museum’s value for scholarly and scientific research is also considerable, and it is placed in jeopardy by any effort to close the facility, even temporarily.
So, in all fairness, I guess they did read the letter. They just didn't read it with comprehension. They must have skimmed through it till they saw the word "bobcat," and sent out the bobcat letter without any further ado.
Link (not lynx) here to Facebook. When I posted Rauner's letter to Facebook, I got back some classic comments. Follow this link to see them.
Last week Jim Harris, who facilitated the Prairieland Strings when we met on the Springfield College-Ursuline Academy campus, dropped by our session and taught us -- playing by ear, no less! -- a shape-note melody called BEACH SPRING. It's one of those haunting pentatonic Anglo-American melodies, and it's been around since 1844, when Benjamin Franklin White included it in the first edition of his Sacred Harp with a hymn text that begins "Come ye sinners, poor and needy." White is regarded as the composer of the tune, although he probably heard it in oral tradition.
(Tangent: I'm not shouting when I capitalize the name of the tune, by the way. It's a convention that people sometimes use when writing about hymns -- names of tunes go in caps, like BEACH SPRING, and names of hymn texts or first lines go in quotation marks, like "Come ye sinners ..." I'm going to follow the convention here because the tune shows up with so many different texts.)
The tune
According to http://www.hymnary.org/tune/beach_spring, BEACH SPRING has been published in 113 different hymnals. For a long time, we closed our sessions at Ursula Hall playing a copyrighted version of it called the "Servant Song."
So I went home and Googled it. Turns out I found a lead sheet with chords and dulcimer tablature on Tull Glazner's website. Glazner notes that BEACH SPRING appeared in several shape-note tunebooks of the early 1800s:
The most well known of these from "The Sacred Harp" is called "Come Ye Sinners Poor and Needy", whose lyrics were written by Joseph Hart in 1759. A related hymn is called "Jesus is Willing". Over the years, many other hymns have been set to this melody, including "Jesus At Your Holy Table", "Come All Christians Be Committed", "Lord Whose Love in Humble Service", and "Healing River of the Spirit". The tune was featured as the theme song for the Ken Burns 1997 PBS documentary about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
And he links to two YouTube videos: (1) of a montage of shape note singing photos set to a background track of "Come Ye Sinners" from the 1991 edition of the Sacred Harprecorded at a shape-note singing convention held in Flora, Ind.; and (2) another version of BEACH SPRING being played on mandola with perfect tempo and dynamics.
A couple of others:
Beech Spring (The Corps of Discovery), Soundtrack to Lewis & Clark TV series.
Mountain dulcimer duet by Doc Gardner and Carolyn Marlett
Beach Spring Hymn tune played on guitar by Brad Sondahl
The text
In its most common form (although not in the Sacred Harp), the hymn text is a composite of a religious text written in 1759 by a Calvinist minister in England named Joseph Hart and an unrelated "floating verse" from American folk tradition.
Hart's verse is:
Come ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love, and pow'r.
And the floating verse, which is treated like a chorus, is:
I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.
Somehow it all fits together. Lyrics a composite from Hymnary.org.
PLEASE NOTE: There is another American folk hymn melody to which Hart's text is often sung together with the camp meeting chorus. It is a minor-key (or Aeolian modal) tune called RESTORATION, and it was collected -- or composed -- by B.F. White's brother-in-law William Walker in Southern Harmony. Here it is, as sung by the Galkin Evangelistic Team:
Last week I was asked by the dulcimer club in Petersburg to tab out "Eating Goober Peas" in DAD tuning, and it's such a fun song I decided to introduce in at Tuesday's session of the Prairieland Strings, meeting at 7 p.m. at Atonement Lutheran Church, 2800 West Jefferson, Springfield. It needs no introduction, but I found a couple of YouTube videos.
But first, a plug: The Petersburg folks have been invited to take part in a Civil War re-enactment during the Illinois State Fair in August. It's an honor, and I'll bet they have a lot of fun. Watch for them.
Two clips below:
The first is an old video of longtime folk singer Burl Ives and an impossibly young-looking Johnny Cash singing it on a TV show (Johnny Cash's? during the 60s?). Their vocals more than make up for the irritating studio band backing them.
The second is an audio clip with still pictures, of a performance by the 2nd South Carolina String Band of Gettysburg, Pa. They're a feature at the big re-enactments on the East Coast, and they make a decent effort at recreating the spirit of Civil War-era music with a contemporary folk and old-time string band sound. For what it's worth, I think they square that circle admirably. Always worth a listen.
The fount of all human knowledge at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goober_Peas tells us that "Eating Goober Peas" was first published in 1866 by A. E. Blackmar in New Orleans, with words attributed to A. Pindar and music to P. Nutt. Before you take that too seriously, however, you should know that "Pindar" is another word for the peanut and "P. Nutt" is ... well, take another look at it!
JPEG files of the original are available online in the Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection on the Johns Hopkins University website at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/12885. Dulcimer players take note -- the original is in D! That means people who aren't high sopranos can sing it.
All Hail to Thee O Blessed Morn. Carols By The Fireside - Howard J Foster.
Var hälsad, sköna morgonstund (sung by Andreas Hoas). Swedish Hymnal 1819: no.55, "Var hälsad sköna morgonstund" (Wie schön leuchtet der morgenstern). Sung by Andreas Hoas, Gammalsvenskby (Старошведське, Starosjvedske; in German: Altschwedendorf). Hoas sings in Swedish, with a Estonian-Swedish accent. The melody is flourished with ornaments and melismatic "fill-ins".
Jens Fredborg -- YouTube user -- Vär hälsad, sköna morgonstund - Ett Jesus, än påminner jag -- melody from Den Svenska Koralbok played on keyboard
Lars Mörlid & Peter Sandwall, Christian contemporary duo -- in concert in 2011 Var hälsad sköna morgonstund ("All Hail to Thee" begins at 3:40)
Attending julotta in Sweden is to many Swedish Americans one of the most treasured of memories. Snow is connected with it and sleigh bells and a journey across the countryside in the dark morning hour, brightened by the flickering flames of torches.
Many have memories of a city church within walking distance, and they remember with no less feeling of nostalgia how the snow crunched under the feet and how the light streamed out of the windows as they approached the church.
Julotta in Sweden
Thus, each one of us gathers memories out of the milieu from which we come. But to all of us the message of Christmas and the singing of "Var hälsad, sköna morgonstund" (literally, be greeted beautiful morning hour) constitute common ground. This hymn is still numbered 55 in the revised hymnal of the Swedish State Church, and the manner in which it is sung each Christmas morning indicates clearly that the congregation knows it by heart.
A Minnesota professor of Swedish descent, now deceased, maintained that it was a mistake to sing this hymn in an English translation. It had only one version, according to him, and that was the Swedish. "That is the way I learned it as a child and that is the way I continue to sing it regardless of what the rest of the congregation sings," he would say with an emphatic nod.
“Jul” or Yule, was celebrated long before Christianity came to Scandinavia.
At that time it was an observation of the winter solistice, that from then on the days would become longer and darkness gradually recede.
It was a celebration of light returning.
The word “jul” or Yule means “the change” of “the feast of feasts”, with reference to midwinter reveries celebrated around new years.
There was plenty of mead and plenty of food, indulging in a sort of magic of plenty.
It was believed that it would ensure prosperity and plenty for the coming year.
The “yule night” was loaded with supernatural powers when even the animals could speak.
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Christmas in Scandinavia is an antidote to darkness, a way to break winter's hold. Nowhere else in the world is it celebrated quite so warmly - or with so much candlelight and food - as in this northern corner of Europe.
Blast email I sent out today to the mailing list for our Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music jam sessions. We meet next Saturday morning, July 4, and we'll be tackling "America the Beautiful." So I went on line to find chords, dulcimer tab and video clips. And I struck pay dirt! The YouTube video embedded below is from a historic benefit concert, only a few days after 9/11, and it features a haunting version of the song fronted by Willie Nelson.
First, the video:
Willie Nelson and Ensemble - "America the Beautiful" From the "America: A Tribute to Heroes" telethon, a benefit concert to raise money for New York City firefighters, policemen and others who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. It aired live on 35 broadcast and cable networks on Friday, Sept. 21, only 10 days after the 9/11 atrocity. Clint Eastwood introduced the song, and Willie Nelson sang lead, backed by too many performers to mention by name. Watch it a couple of times -- Willie's vocal is, well, you know ... and you'll have fun picking out the performers for yourself!
Here's the blast email, lightly edited for posting on line --
Hi everybody --
A reminder: Our regular July session of the Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music is from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday, July 4, at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop on Ill. 125 at Pleasant Plains. Since it's the Fourth of July, Chuck suggested we play "America the Beautiful." So I went looking on line and found chords -- with lyrics -- and a melody line in G.
I also found a wonderful YouTube video of Willie Nelson playing an intro on acoustic guitar and singing it, backed by a whole stage full of first-class performers at a benefit concert 10 days after 9/11. I embedded it on my blog, along with the email message [...]
Be sure to watch it. I can't think of a more appropriate piece of music for the 4th of July!
Here are links to our music for the session at Clayville:
A word about the dulcimer tab. The melody is in G, so it calls for using a capo on the third fret in the usual DAD tuning. But I could no more play that tab than I could fly to the moon! It starts out on the bass string and jumps around all over the place. You're welcome to try it if you don't want to break away from the DAD lockstep, but I also tabbed it out for a DGD tuning and wrote in fret numbers in red ink below the notes. [If you're reading this on line, please note: You can do this yourself. Print out the tab, and write in the numbers below the notes: G is on the 3rd fret, A on the 4th, B on the 5th and so on up to G' on the 10th fret. You'll find one note, a G# between the 10th and 11th frets that isn't on the dulcimer. I just play that riff as A-A-A instead of A-G#-A.] That way I can play it the way a mountain dulcimer was meant to be played. A copy of my tab, with the frets in red, is attached.
A word about the DGD tuning. It's Ionian, which means the key note -- G in this case -- is on the third fret and you skip the 6-and-a-half fret as you play up the scale from 3 to 10. It's easy to retune from DAD, too. All you have to do is to tune the middle string down a whole step -- from A to G -- and you're ready to go. It takes about the same amount of time as it does to put on a capo. Try it, you'll like it.
DGD has a nice sound, too. Try it, like I said, you'll like it.
First of ____ posts on Johan Dillner's explanation of the intervals of the 12-tone chromatic scale, the old church modes (kyrkotonarter) and how to play them on the psalmodikon.
Here's something that's been driving me crazy, and I think I'm beginning -- finally! -- to get it figured out. So I want to post it here while it's still clear in my mind. Well, sorta kinda clear. I've long suspected that a table in Johan Dillner's Melodierna till Swenska Kyrkans Psalmer (1830) contains the keys to the kingdom, i.e. that it will allow me to understand the intervals of a 19th-century Swedish psalm, or hymn, and how they play out on the fretboard of a psalmodikon.
Dillner said with a little practice, you can learn to play a psalmodikon in a couple of hours. I'm sure he was right. It's a reminder that music theory can get in the way sometimes.
But music theory also helps me understand why major and minor tunes sound the way they do.
It just takes longer. So let's get started.
Here's Dillner's chart (Melodierna xiii). Its headline reads (in translation): "The monochord's classification after Chladni." The psalmodikon, of course, is just a monochord. And Ernst Chaldni was an 18th-century German physicist and musician sometimes known as the "father of acoustics."
But first, a couple of suffixes we'll need to know: In Swedish, "-iss" after a note means sharp, and "-ess" means flat. So "ciss" (no hyphen between them) is C-sharp, and "cess" is C-flat. And "diss" means D-sharp and "dess" means D-flat ... and so on for the other notes of the scale.
With that in mind, here are the intervals of a C major scale as Dillner explains them. Some will be abundantly clear, especially if you keep in mind that C-sharp is the same as D-flat and so on up the scale. Others may take a while. Still others I'm still not too sure of. But I'm translating all of them, even the ones I don't think I'll ever need to know, because I have a way of coming back to this table as I learn more about music theory and/or 19th-century Swedish hymnody. The intervals are as follows:
1. Unison [also commonly known, in Swedish and English, as Prime]. Since it's the distance between two notes on the same pitch, the interval is C to C.
2. Överstigande Primen, or augmented unison, or prime. The interval is the distance from C to "ciss" or C-sharp.
3. Lilla Secunden, or minor second. The distance from C to D-flat.
4. Stora Secunden, or major second. From C to D. ["Lilla" is the Swedish word for little, and "stora" is the word for big.]
5. Förminskad Terzen, or diminished third. C to E-flat. [And C-sharp to E? I guess it makes sense, but I wasn't a music major and I'm not at all sure about this!]
6. Överstigande Second, or augmented second. C to D-sharp. [My instincts, and Wikibooks, are telling me this is the same as a diminished third. But I'm not sure it matters! Swedish-American pastors and country church choirs out on the Illinois prairie in the 1860s probably weren't too worried about it, in any event.]
7. Lilla Terzen, or minor third. C to E-flat. [This one is important. We'll come back to it when we get to the church modes.]
8. Stora Terzen, major third. C to E.
9. Förminskad Qvarten, diminished fourth. C to F-flat.
10. Rena Qvarten, perfect fourth. C to F.
11. Överstigande Qvarten, augmented fourth. C to F-sharp.
12. Förminskad Qvinten, diminished fifth. C to G-flat. [I'll spare you the joke about the bluegrass band and the diminished fifth of whiskey.]
13. Rena Qvinten, perfect fifth. C to G. [Jack Daniels?]
14. Överstigande Qvinten, augmented fifth. [Y'see, they sent the banjo player out between sets for another bottle, and he came back with an augmented fifth. But I wasn't going to go there!]
15. Lilla Sexten, minor sixth. C to A-flat.
16. Stora Sexten, major sixth. C to A.
17. Förminskad Septiman, diminished seventh. C to B-flat or C-sharp to B.
18. Överstigande Sexten, augmented sixth. C to A-sharp.
19. Lilla Septimen, minor seventh. C to B-flat. [This is an important note -- don't skip over it: In the German notation used in Scandinavia, "B" stands for B-flat and "H" stands for B.
20. Stora Septiman, major seventh. C to H. [See above. In Sweden, "H" stands for B. And "B" stands for B-flat. Don't ask why -- it has something to do with old-fashioned German handwriting, and the story that Bach liked it because he could spell his name on a organ keyboard is just a story.]
21. Förminskad Oktaven, diminished octave. C to C-flat.
22. Rena Octaven, perfect octave. C to C'.
Why does all of this stuff matter? Because the numerical tablature for a psalmodikon -- the sifferskrift -- is written to reflect degrees of the scale: 1 = do, 2 = re, 3 = mi and so on up the diatonic major scale. That's the scale you'd get if you start at middle C and play the white keys on a piano up the octave. But it's not the only scale in Dillner's system -- which is actually the system of modes inherited from the 15th- and 16th-century church.
Essentially the modes were different scales, the ones you get it you start on different white keys of the piano and play up eight tones to the octave. By the 1800s, all but two -- which we know today as the major (Ionian) and minor (Aeolian) -- had dropped out of common practice, although traditional Irish musicians (and some Appalachian dulcimer players) also know the Mixolydian and Dorian even today.
Here's Dillner's school table (skoltablan) of the church mode scales (Kyrkotonarternas Skalor). The major (Ionisk in Swedish) and minor (Aeolisk) are at the bottom. As you study the table, you will see the intervals of the 12-tone chromatic scale are different in each of the modes. As time permits, I will be posting brief explanations and examples of how to read Swedish sifferskrift in the major and minor modes.
This is probably going to be one of the more oddball bits of commentary on President Obama's powerful eulogy today at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney at Emanuel Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Pinkney and eight members of "Mother Emanuel" were murdered June __ by a self-admitted white supremacist. In the course of his eulogy, Obama dropped his usual professorial manner for a minute or two and sang "Amazing Grace." Not only did he lead the congregation in singing the old Baptist song, but he sang it in the old-fashioned Doctor Watts style of the African American church.
President Obama at Emanuel AME Church, Charleston (C-SPAN)
When I came across the TV coverage of the funeral, I was in the middle of writing a friend about one of my obsessions -- traditional Irish sean nos (old style) singing and the relationship that I believe to exist between Irish and southern Appalachian vocal music. Both have a lot of melisma or ornamentation -- a technical term meaning that the notes are often "bent," so that one word might be stretched out over two or three different notes -- and I was merrily looking up YouTube clips of southern Appalachian singers whose style was highly ornamented.
And then I heard President Obama singing "Amazing Grace" in a highly ornamented style.
So I mentioned it in my email message.
Which is why it starts out with a reference to a post that my friend sent me on the Irish Music Daily website about sean nos, and segues without warning into some of my thoughts about where southern Appalachian music came from and then -- with even less warning -- President Obama's eulogy and the very similar style of ornamentation in old-fashioned African American church singing. I decided to post it to Hogfiddle, not so much because I believe my theorizing has an unusual amount of merit, but because I want to be able to link to the YouTube clips I pulled together for examples of different kind of melisma.
Lightly edited in the interest of coherence, my email message to my friend follows:
Thanks for sharing!
I followed the links from the article you sent me about sean nos and found some really cool YouTube clips by Joe Heaney, Iarla O Lionard and a family group from the North [of Ireland] that I'm not familiar with.
And it hit a lot of my buttons -- I'm really interested in where our music came from, especially in the southern hill country, and its antecedents in Ireland, Scotland and the North of England. I've got a theory that the way singers bend notes, and work in those swoops and slurs between notes -- melisma is the technical term -- came over to America with the Ulstermen who came to the southern Appalachians in the 1700s.
So I've been happily looking on YouTube for video clips -- they're not all the same, but I think the style of singing is related and I'd be interested to get your take on it. What's the same? What's different?
I promised some YouTube links. Here they are:
Sheila Kay Adams is a traditional singer from western North Carolina, who learned the old ballads from her family (one of them sang for Cecil Sharp in 1915). Her style of singing is as close as we can get today to the old way (which, I believe, is what "sean nos" means in English) ...
And here she is singing a novelty song called "The Farmer's Cursed Wife." I don't want to make too much of this, but the way she closes her eyes reminds me a little of sean nos singers. Cute song, too:
The style of singing survives a little bit in the Primitive Baptist churches down home. Here's a congregation in Kentucky lining out "Amazing Grace" -- where the song leader kind of chants the first line of a verse, and they all join in:
And then this afternoon when I saw the clips of President Obama singing "Amazing Grace," I was reminded there's something very much like it in the African American tradition. I won't link to to Obama -- I'm sure you've already heard it today -- but here's Mahalia Jackson:
I wouldn't exactly call Mahalia Jackson a sean nos singer, but I think there's a relationship there. I don't know what it is, exactly, but I feel it in my bones.
My sister-in-law Marian Edmund-Paulson shot a video Sunday when I demonstrated the Jenny Lind Chapel psalmodikon and taught an old Swedish-American hymn, "Again, Thy glorious sun doth rise" (Din klara sol går åter opp), to the congregation at First Baptist in Moline:
https://www.facebook.com/debi.ellertsen/posts/10204315181872073.
It's been shared a couple of times, including by the Nordiska Psalmodikonförbundet (Nordic Psalmodikon Association) in Sweden. The picture above is a screen grab from Marian's FB status. Note words of hymn projected on front wall of the sanctuary at upper right of picture.
'Saro' from the Sam Amidon album 'All Is Well' -- released on Bedroom Community 2008. Video by Jeremy Blatter. Uploaded on Jan 14, 2008
More about Sam Amidon below.
Lexington Herald-Leader
By far the best obit of Jean Ritchie that I've read appeared Tuesday in the Lexington Herald-Leader, just a few miles up the road (I-75) from Berea. Tuesday's Herald-Leader also carried an editorial "Jean Ritchie: A Righteous Voice of Kentucky." It noted:
If you could take all the sweetness and pain of Kentucky's hills — the green valleys and lilting streams, the evening cool, the history of struggle, oppression and strength — and distill them into a sound, it would be Ritchie's voice.
Her legacy — the songs she wrote and the old songs she saved — will live forever as new generations follow Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Rhiannon Giddens and many others who have borrowed from the Ritchie songbook.
Some of her originals, such as "Black Waters," "Blue Diamond Mines" and "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore," personalize environmental and economic injustices in a plain yet piercing way that few writers have equaled.
But most of all, the editorial said this:
She and her husband, George Pickow, a filmmaker and photographer who died in 2010, were an accomplished team.
They documented not just the folkways and music of Appalachia and the British Isles but also of traditional cultures around the world. Their extensive work is part of the American Folklife Center's collection.
Ritchie led a remarkable life that ended as it began, according to her son, Jon Pickow, surrounded by her family singing.
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/02/3881455/jean-ritchie-a-righteous-voice.html#storylink=cpy ).
I don't read editorials anymore. Most of them move me to heartburn, if they move me at all. But this one moved me almost to tears.
The Herald-Leader's obituary itself had a prosaic news-obituary headline -- "Jean Ritchie, 92, introduced mountain dulcimer music to the world" -- but it was equally moving. Written by John Cheves of the Herald-Leader, it was lyrical in places.
Here's Cheves's description of the Ritchie family singing in earlier, happier days:
Jean Ruth Ritchie was the last of 14 children born to Balis and Abigail Ritchie in a long-ago place where if you wanted to hear any music, you had better be able to produce it yourself.
The Ritchies, nicknamed "The Singing Family of the Cumberlands," were more than able. Accompanied by Balis on the fiddle or mountain dulcimer, the family joined voices on the front porch in the summer, around the fireplace in the winter, at church, at parties, at festivals. They sang of the hangman and his rope and of Mother getting ready for Heaven when He calls and of Baby Jesus born born O born in Betha-lye-hem. NBC broadcast their Christmas 1955 family reunion to a national audience, live from Viper. There was plenty of music.
More than anything else I've read, Clives' obit in the Herald Leader captures the mixture of high artistry, sophistication and down-home simplicity in Ritchie's music.
Ritchie attended Cumberland College and the University of Kentucky before moving to New York City in 1947 to become a social worker. Her after-hours singing and dulcimer playing in coffeehouses quickly won her a following. In this period following World War II, folk music was a popular curiosity for big-city sophisticates.
This was the first of several "folk revivals" to come, and it launched her career. Dulcimers were uncommon in New York before Ritchie arrived. Afterward, it was — and remains — hard to find a music store without one.
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/02/3881155_jean-ritchie-who-introduced-mountain.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/02/3881155_jean-ritchie-who-introduced-mountain.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy
Here is what the press has to say about the album:
"sky-scrapingly great ... All Is Well is viscerally stunning, comforting, upsetting, entrancing; as long as he can make art like this, Amidon can skip the formality of 'writing songs' forever" -Stylus Magazine
"With All Is Well, Sam Amidon has crafted a precious gem of a record, all in nuances and shades, with delicate overtones and airy harmonies. Sigurðsson's production is light and subtle yet it gives these songs fantastic depth and contrast without ever overshadowing Amidon's delivery. " -The Milk Factory
"A soaring and beautiful butterfly of an album, rich with tuneful wonder and epic song craft." -MusiqueMachine.com
" A veritable classic, a standard for comparisons in this genre from now on. Not to be missed." -Touching Extremes
"a great leap forward... the trio of artists responsible for the record [...] create a very specific space with these arrangements... a very forward-thinking album... Amidon doesn't just update the old world to the new, but finds the roots of the new world in the old. - Pitchfork
"...something of a revelation. Amidon took a collection of traditional songs, wrote new arrangements and [...] turned them into a bedroom rock classic." -Dusted Magazine
An obituary and a reminiscence, followed by a Jean Ritchie song I hope to introduce at Saturday's jam session at Clayville Historic Stagecoach Stop on Ill. 125 in Pleasant Plains.
*Jean Ritchie, with Warren May and Alan Mills at Berea College, 2012
Jean Ritchie of Berea, Ky., who arguably did more to take the Appalachian dulcimer into the mainstream of 20th-century American traditional music than anyone else, died Monday at the age of 92. Others knew her far better than I, so I'll just link to her obits in today's Louisville Courier-Journal, sort of a hometown paper for eastern Kentucky, and the New York Times, also sort of a hometown paper for Ritchie since her career as a musician took off in New York City and she lived on Long Island until her husband George Pickow's death in 2010. Recovering from a stroke she suffered in 2009, she returned to Kentucky and lived near Berea. Reported Margalit Fox of the Times:
The youngest of 14 children in a farming family from Viper, Ky., Ms. Ritchie was a vital link in a chain of oral tradition that stretched back centuries. Her recordings and concerts — she appeared on some of the world’s celebrated stages, including Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Albert Hall in London — helped keep the music alive for an international listenership.
Over the years Ms. Ritchie performed jointly with some of the best-known names in folk music, including Pete Seeger and Doc Watson. She was closely associated with the Newport Folk Festival, performing at its inception in 1959 and many times afterward.
Jeffrey Lee Puckett of the Courier-Journal noted, quite correctly, that Jean Ritchie was intimately involved with the folk revival of the 1960s, both in Greenwich Village and the Newport Festival. He added:
Nancy Johnson Barker, a longtime friend and musical compatriot of Ritchie's who organizes the annual Kentucky Music Weekend festival at Iroquois Amphitheater in Louisville, described Ritchie as the "premiere folk singer and traditional folk artist" not only in Kentucky but also nationally — and even internationally.
"She's the reason everybody across the country knows about the dulcimer," Johnson said. The albums she recorded "were shared and played and shared again all across the country."
If it weren't for Jean Ritchie, people like me wouldn't be playing the dulcimer.
I met her two or three times, in receiving lines at dulcimer festivals toward the end of her musical career when she was there to receive lifetime achievement awards. We only spoke briefly -- I recall chuckling with her about the way her fellow Kentuckian Homer Ledford made dulcimers out of scrap wood (my Homer Ledford has a butternut top made of wood from old school desks) -- and I noticed she had a good word for everyone who came up to shake her hand. She was down-to-earth, and completely unaffected.
Others knew her far better than I, like I said, but a couple of Jean Ritchie stories have stayed with me. Once at the Swananoa Gathering, I noticed she was using a big floppy pick on fiddle tunes like "Shady Grove" and "Swing and Turn Jubilee." So between sets I went up front where she'd laid her dulcimer across a chair so I could take a look. She'd cut a rectangular pick out of the lid to a Philadelphia Cream Cheese tub. Ever since I've cut up an assortment of cream cheese, Prairie Farms, Jewel and Anderson Erickson Dairy lids for when I play with a pick and noter. Drives other players crazy, but it's my little tribute to her.
My other memory is from Lois Hornbostel's mountain dulcimer week at Appalachian State or Western Carolina about 14 or 15 years ago. It was toward the end of Jean Ritchie's farewell concert, and she set the instrument aside and started singing "Amazing Grace" the way she had learned it growing up in the Old Regular Baptist church. She sang a cappella, and we -- the entire audience of several hundred people -- joined in call-and-response style as she started each verse, "Through many dangers, toils and snares ...," and so on, and we sang it back to her. It was one of the most powerful experiences of pure, simple, unadorned music -- singing from the heart as country Baptists down home would say -- that I've ever been a part of.
"Pretty Saro"
According to Wikipedia (which I am coming to regard as the best repository of all human knowledge), "Pretty Saro" is an "English folk ballad" that "was rediscovered in North America" a hundred years ago by Cecil Sharp and other songcatchers in southern Appalachia. That's about as close to its origins as we'll ever get. Several versions have been collected over the years, mostly in North Carolina.
Jean Ritchie has a distinctive version. In a thread on Mudcat Cafe, she said she learned it from her "older sisters who went to Berea College in Kentucky" and they learned it from Gladys Jamison, director of the college's Glee Club. "I think she was the one who brought 'our' [Ritchie family] version of 'Pretty Saro' to the Glee Club, and from there the girls began singing it at home. This would be about 1925-26, with Kitty and Patty who were older and were at Berea first. And I was born at the end of 1922, so you see have known this song ALL my singing life. I guess that's why people think of it as a Ritchie song. I wish Miss Jamison had shared more on her song sources, but she never did, as I know."
Jean Ritchie sang it during the 1960s with Doc Watson (a North Carolinian who had another version of the song) in concert at the Folk City club in New York. It's still available on the Smithsonian Folkways label, and it is monument of the real American folk music.
Listen to Ritchie's accompaniment on the dulcimer. She isn't playing chords -- she's improvising harmonies and countermelodies, the same way she and her family did at home.
"We never sang "Saro" without harmony -- just made-up, natural harmonies," she said of their singing on the Mudcat thread. "It's gorgeous, to use a modern adjective! It's one of those tunes calls for harmony, and almost everything one sings sounds great. I used to sing what we called a 'low tenor,'...made a lovely bottom for the song."
... and it looks like it's pretty close to Jean Ritchie's version of the traditional song. (I'm not 100 percent sure -- I haven't played it -- but it looks OK on paper. If you play the dulcimer you might want to retune to DAA, though, since the melody is tabbed out on the A string.) The very best way to learn it -- and get a feel for her lovely, simple harmonies -- is to pick up a copy of Jean Ritchie's "Dulcimer Book" (1963).
"The Dulcimer Book" is the book most of us learned to play from back in the day, and it's still in print. Look for it online at Amazon.com, Folkcraft, McSpadden and other outlets. Her tab has fret numbers -- no chords, the dulcimer wasn't (and IMO still isn't) a chordal instrument -- and standard notation. It's in C instead of D, but if you tune the dulcimer to CGG or DAA, you can follow the fret numbers till you know it by ear and the instrument will transpose to whichever key you tune it to.
__________
* Jean Ritchie was the guest of honor at a gallery reception for industrial arts professor Allan Mills' exhibition of antique Kentucky dulcimers at Berea College in the fall of 2012. From left, in picture above: A caretaker whose name I didn't get, Jean Ritchie, luthier Warren May of Berea and Mills.
