Harry Burleigh as ethnomusicologist? Transcription, arranging, and the Old Songs Hymnal.

Harry Burleigh's demeanor has been described variously by some of the younger artists of the Harlem Renaissance as elegant and refined or as aloof and removed. Although many saw dignity in Burleigh's bearing as well as in his artistic arrangements of spirituals, others saw something else. Harlem Renaissance choral arranger and director Eva Jessye intimated that Burleigh's deportment was "related to his desire to disclaim his racial heritage" (quoted in Spencer 1997, 6). Zora Neale Hurston struck a similar note in a 1931 letter to Charlotte Mason, asserting that Harry Burleigh "has less sympathy for the Negro than anyone ... [that I] can imagine" (6). Either complaint may have stemmed partly from Burleigh's focus on art song arrangements of spirituals instead of a more folk-centric attempt at presenting this music. And yet, it is interesting to note that during the 1920s and early 1930s, Harry Burleigh regularly traveled to rural Georgia to transcribe spirituals from black tenant farmers. Burleigh was well aware of the spiritual as it existed in the folk sphere in the 1920s, not to mention the plight of southern Negros and issues surrounding the preservation of their racial heritage. Of the more than 600 extant transcriptions that Burleigh made of African-American folksongs (Burleigh [ca. 1929]), 187 spirituals were published jointly with Burleigh's collaborator, Dorothy Bolton, in a hymnal titled The Old Songs Hymnal, Words and Melodies from the State of Georgia (Bolton and Burleigh 1929). Burleigh's work on this hymnal and his journey to transcribe folk tunes in rural Georgia remain an unknown but significant chapter in his biography. In order to fill in this lacuna, this article briefly surveys Burleigh's transcriptions and arrangements of spirituals, as well as the known biographies of some of his informants and his collaborator, Dorothy Bolton.

The details of Burleigh's work in rural Georgia must be inferred from the extant manuscripts and the Old Songs Hymnal. The majority of both Dorothy Bolton's and Harry Burleigh's personal correspondence appears to have been destroyed, which precludes definitive conclusions about motives and methods. The only oral accounts of Burleigh's trip come from Dorothy Bolton's grandsons, who are now in possession of Burleigh's manuscripts. They claim that Bolton employed Burleigh because she saw him as the leading expert on spirituals in America (Bolton 2003). Although Bolton had collected the texts of many African-American folktales and folksongs, she could not transcribe the music. According to her descendants, Bolton transcribed the lyrics of the spirituals, and Burleigh transcribed the tunes. Later, the two published a hymnal containing many of these songs. Neither grandson remembers Burleigh, although both were alive (under ten years old) and living nearby during his last datable visit in 1933.

There are two types of manuscripts extant. The first is a legible transcription of a spiritual, with the music handwritten in pen (see Ex. 1). The musical notes are clearly written without mistakes in Burleigh's unambiguous hand. Words referring to the music, such as "verse," "cho" (for chorus), "slower," or "rubato," also appear in Burleigh's handwriting. The sureness of Burleigh's musical penmanship, which dates from his early training as a stenographer and is better known through his more famous work with Dvorak, is clearly reflected in these transcriptions. The texts of the spirituals are typed beneath the music, the syllables aligning with the notes and the extra verses appearing below the music. It seems likely that Bolton typed the text into Burleigh's musical manuscripts. (1) These legible transcriptions include 500 pieces of African-American folk music. Dorothy Bolton created an index for most of these songs, although the extant indices do not fully match the titles of the songs. Of these tunes, 187 furnish the soprano lines and texts for the arrangements in the Old Songs Hymnal. Most of these pen transcriptions are spirituals that likely came from Mansfield, Georgia. But around a dozen bear typed descriptions indicating a different provenance; for example, the "Convict Song from Augusta" contains a typed description of the song's origin:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

   The women convicts, at their noon hour marched in a circle chanting
   this song--they kept time by dropping one knee on the beat as
   though they had gone lame and snapping their fingers at the same
   time. The persons mentioned by name [in the songs] are or were well
   known persons in Augusta about ten years ago.

[ILLUSTRATION 1 OMITTED]

The second type of manuscript appears to be the pencil transcription taken in real time at the moment of singing. All of these manuscripts appear in two softcover books of notation paper, and some of the transcriptions contain dates. Most of the dates include various days in January, February, and July but do not provide a year; however, several transcriptions do give the year 1933, suggesting that these songs were gathered after the 1929 publication of the Old Songs Hymnal.

At least a dozen or more entries appear to be written in an anonymous hand (perhaps Bolton's), but 160 of these pencil versions appear to be in Harry Burleigh's own hand. Although the pencil transcriptions give no provenances, many of the tunes are attributed to people who were tenant farmers on the Burge plantation, Bolton's family plantation, during the 1920s and early 1930s. It seems that Burleigh continued making pilgrimages to rural Georgia to transcribe folksongs well into the Depression.

Burleigh presumably traveled through the fields and tenant houses around Mansfield, Georgia, sketching songs quickly. In a few cases, two- and three-note harmonies appear at a particular point, but the sketches overwhelmingly depict a single melody line. The manuscripts do not indicate how much group singing Burleigh heard or whether he heard harmonic presentations or unison/solo versions of folk songs. The writing on the pages is pressed closely together, suggesting that Burleigh was conserving paper and did not intend the manuscript to be read by others.

Example 2 provides a typical page from the pencil transcriptions. Approximately half of the songs in this Belwin, soft-cover folio of blank notation paper were transcribed upside down. Perhaps Burleigh began his transcriptions quickly, simply opening the book and writing regardless of what side of the paper was on top. Three songs appear in Example 2, marked by a cross in the left margins and numbered 1, 2, and 3. In this case, Burleigh lists the informant's name, Charlie Rhodes, at the top of the page, but most of the pages do not list particular names. Rhodes was a tenant farmer and handyman employed by the Burge plantation in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This page is dated "Feb. 8" and other pages with Rhodes's name appear with dates that include the year 1933. It seems likely that Burleigh transcribed these three songs on February 8, 1933.

[ILLUSTRATION 2 OMITTED]

Burleigh's transcription of the melodies in notation follows an idiosyncratic kind of shorthand. Burleigh appears to have indicated a key signature in most examples by writing a number followed by a flat or sharp sign. See for example his use of "5 [flat]" in the upper left of Example 2. In some cases, Burleigh transcribed an entire tune with ledger lines rather than placing the tune within the staff. Given his fairly consistent and precise indications of key signatures, his willingness to use ledger lines instead of placing the melodies in the middle of the staff, and the probability that these transcriptions were taken directly from a singer, I assume that Burleigh had perfect pitch. There are no time signatures in the pencil transcriptions. Burleigh almost never uses traditional notes to indicate duration, except for whole notes, which designate pitch. Rhythm does seem to be indicated by the use of lines over some notes to suggest that these notes are of a longer duration than the surrounding notes.

The texts of the pencil transcriptions also follow an idiosyncratic shorthand. Burleigh consistently wrote the complete title of the songs that are transcribed. The words "Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveller [sic]" appear just below the name "Charlie Rhodes" in Example 2. Burleigh almost never wrote all of the lyrics underneath the melody. The written lyrics often employ the use of first letters of words to indicate entire words. For example, the text provided under the first few notes of the first song in Example 2 is "Let us cheer th w w tr vel er," instead of "Let us cheer the weary traveler." Later, Burleigh condenses the lyrics even more, using mostly letters. Burleigh almost never wrote the same text twice under any of these pencil transcriptions. When multiple verses appear with one of the pencil transcriptions, they are written below the melody, before the next song.

There are few correlations between the initial pencil transcriptions and the more legible pen transcriptions. I believe that most of the pen transcriptions were compiled before the publication of the Old Songs Hymnal, whereas most of the pencil transcriptions postdate the hymnal. When correlations occur, they appear to reflect variant versions of the same tune rather than a transcription of the same tune. For example, the pencil transcription of the tune "Bear Your Burden" is in a minor key, but the version in the pen transcriptions is in major.

At some point before fall 1929, Harry Burleigh and Dorothy Bolton selected 187 tunes from the songs that they transcribed. In the hymnal, these tunes were placed in categories that align more closely to the categories of folklorists than of liturgists (e.g., Folk Songs in the Making, Narrative Songs, Songs of Death). By and large, the 187 tunes are spirituals, although ten of the tunes probably come from various nineteenth-century hymnals. (2) However, 60 percent of the tunes do not appear in fifteen of the better-known early twentieth-century collections of spirituals. In other words, the Old Songs Hymnal contains more than 120 tunes and texts that were not published elsewhere before 1929 (see App.).

Of the 187 tunes in the Bolton and Burleigh hymnal, 109 are pentatonic, most following a 1-2-3-5-6 scale. Some tunes are modal, some follow three- and four-note scales, and only one follows a seven-note diatonic scale. Seven tunes are in [??] time, two of the spirituals change between [??] and [??], and one tune is in [??] time. The rest follow some form of duple meter (c or [??]). The lengths of the tunes vary from simple choruses of four measures to longer spirituals of up to twenty-four measures.

A full exploration of the texts is not appropriate here, but the use of dialect requires mention. The penned transcriptions and the arrangements that Harry Burleigh made vary greatly in quantity and style of dialect. At some point during the editorial process of the Old Songs Hymnal, much of the dialect in the spirituals was altered. As a consequence, the Old Songs Hymnal contains significantly less dialect than any other contemporary spiritual publication, making it stand out in contrast to the rest. Neither Burleigh nor Bolton appears to have been opposed to the use of dialect, but most of the unconventional spellings of words throughout the hymnal have been changed into "correct English" spellings. However, notice that Burleigh's pencil transcriptions (see Ex. 2) do not use dialect, whereas almost all of the pen transcriptions' texts (see Ex. 1), typed by Bolton, employ dialect. It remains unclear who altered the dialect of the texts in the Old Songs Hymnal. Of course, it is possible that Bolton and Burleigh used correct spellings to grant the hymnal broader use, or, more likely, to keep amateur musicians from parodying African-American dialect while singing these songs.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Burleigh's arrangements in the Old Songs Hymnal mark a departure from his other work with the spiritual. The hymnal's foreword contains clues that might explain this deviation. Not only did he treat these songs as hymns, something that R. Nathaniel Dett did in his Religious Songs of the Negro (1927), but Burleigh chose to set the tunes "as simply as possible." In doing so, Burleigh may have hoped to make the music more accessible to performance in church, home, and school, thus "preserving to us this precious heritage." The foreword also notes that the Old Songs Hymnal responds to other collections whose accompaniments were too difficult "for the average person to play at sight" (Bolton and Burleigh 1929, v). Was the Old Songs Hymnal Burleigh's answer to the relatively difficult piano parts found in the Johnson brothers' books of spirituals (Johnson 1925, 1926)? It seems likely that Burleigh's work was a direct response to other published collections of spirituals.

Burleigh's decision to make the arrangements in the Old Songs Hymnal as simple as possible also makes them easy to underestimate. Skimming through the book, one sees a number of tunes that first appear to be harmonically static. Some dozen or so tunes contain only two or three total harmonies, and the arrangements seldom move harmonically from a single chord. See, for example, Burleigh's arrangement of "Standing in the Need of Prayer" (see Ex. 3). For nine measures, Burleigh sets the tune to a D minor harmony. In the chorus, he finally changes to a new harmony, F major. But notice that the harmony does not change until the singer realizes that he or she requires prayer. The shift from minor to major marks a subtle rhetorical shift as the singer becomes aware of his or her need. Of course, it is also possible that this harmonic stasis represents what Burleigh might have actually heard in a presentation of the spiritual as it was sung at the time. Although few of the 187 arrangements are as harmonically static as this one, most of the songs use relatively few harmonies.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some of the settings, however, reflect a broad harmonic as well as rhetorical palette. One of the tragedies of this hymnal's scarcity, I believe, is that some of Burleigh's arrangements have not found their way into modern hymnals. See, for example, "He Never Said a Mumbling Word" (Ex. 4). Notice the use of suspensions, passing tonic minor chords, the poignant deceptive cadence, or the dominant 13th (or [V.sup.+6]) to tonic cadence (which Burleigh uses frequently in the hymnal, most often to accompany modal/pentatonic cadences). The rhythm differs from other versions of this hymn but could reflect an approximation of the rhythm Burleigh heard from one of his informants. Burleigh's artistic stamp on these hymns is not heavy, but it is consistently evident.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So, who are the singers whose songs were recorded in the Old Songs Hymnal and in Harry Burleigh's musical transcriptions? Dorothy Bolton writes of the songs represented in the legible penned transcriptions: "If there is any value here, 'any virtue or praise,' it goes to these dear people who have given me the songs" (Bolton 1998, xiii). Of the ten or so African-American individuals mentioned by name in the manuscripts, Dorothy Bolton was apparently closest to three people: George and Sidney Gunn and Josie Marks. By 1892, Dorothy Bolton's grandmother Dolly and her mother, Sarah, had died. At that time, Dorothy and her siblings were sent to relatives to be reared. The Burge plantation, the family's farm, was not sold for the support of the children, as might have been expected. Instead, the Burge plantation was entrusted to the management of an African-American couple, George and Sidney Gunn (see Fig. 1). Perhaps even more unusual than an African American becoming the manager for a large farm in Klan-ridden rural Georgia was that, for two decades or so after 1892, the Gunns appear to have had little if any supervision in the management of the property (Street, 1917, 398).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

George Gunn was born around 1850 in Georgia. It is unclear if he was originally a slave for the Burge family, although it is unlikely that he was born a freeman. Around 1874, George married Sidney, whose mother, Letty, was the cook and housekeeper for the Burge plantation during Dorothy's grandmother Dolly's lifetime; so Sidney was born a slave to the Burge family. According to the 1900 census, Sidney was born in 1853. Dorothy claims that Sidney was sometimes her nanny when she was a child and that Sidney sang spirituals to her since she was in the cradle (Bolton, Letters 1897-1924). Dorothy also recalls going with her nanny, presumably Sidney, to an African-American church on Sundays (Bolton, Letters 1897-1924). Both George and Sidney Gunn could read and write, according to the 1880 census and subsequent ones. By 1910, George's occupation, which previously was listed as farmer, was listed as a minister of the gospel.

In 1892, when George and Sidney took charge of the plantation, Dorothy Bolton wrote that they reigned as "supremely as any African king and queen. They kept order, and followed out the religious teaching of their youth, and the history of ... [the Burge plantation] for peacefulness and utter lack of violence is unparalleled" (Bolton 1998, xii). According to the History of Newton County, the Burge plantation had around twelve tenant farmer families during the first decades of the twentieth century (Newton County Historical Society 1988, 596-597). The relationship between the tenants and George and Sidney can be understood as told by Julian Street, an essayist and novelist who knew the family. Street wrote a travelogue that describes a visit to the Burge plantation in the spring of 1916. He notes that George and Sidney still lived in the plantation home (which had four or five bedrooms at the time) with Dorothy Bolton, her sister Ida Morehouse, and their spouses and children. According to Street (1917, 398-399), Sidney still "presides as housekeeper and cook," and George "supervises all the business of the plantation, as he has done for thirty or forty years. He collects all rents, markets the crops and receives the payments, makes purchases, pays bills, and keeps peace between the tenants--nor could any human being be more honorable or possess a finer, sweeter dignity."

Although the Gunns likely accounted for many of the songs that Bolton collected, most of the songs came from Josie Marks. Born Josie Patrick during the 1860s, she married John Marks in 1898. The 1910 census claims that she had lost six children; it also suggests that Josie and John Marks were living in the Burge plantation house with the Gunns and Archie Patrick, presumably Josie's brother. Sometime between 1920 and 1930, John Marks died. According to an African-American octogenarian from Newton County who remembers Josie Marks, her voice sounded like Mahalia Jackson's. (3)

Dorothy Bolton wanted to include a picture of Josie and John Marks and one of their children in the Old Songs Hymnal. She prepared a caption for the picture (Fig. 2).

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

   An epitome of all that life holds. Their domestic happiness was too
   perfect to last. The baby died first--then Johnnie and then Josie.
   Josie was our best singer and had a prodigious memory. I owe to
   her three fourths of these songs. In the summer their cabin is a
   mass of flowers. I go there sometimes to gather them and to listen
   to the murmur of Burge Creek, which almost encircles the little
   house. It reminds me of Josie's deep contralto, and as I push my
   way through the tangle of honeysuckle I remember Josie saying
   "When I'se gwine home f'om wuk, Miss Dolly, an' crosses de creek
   an' I smells de honeysuckle in de cool er de ebenin', seem like I
   jes cain't git no furder." (Bolton 1998, 128)

Josie Marks' tombstone reads: "Josie Marks--Our Singer. She was needed in the Heavenly Choir."

One of the most interesting and enigmatic aspects of Burleigh's transcriptions is Burleigh's relationship with Dorothy Bolton. Unfortunately, almost no records of their interactions exist, other than the transcriptions and the Old Songs Hymnal. Although it seems likely that Bolton sought Burleigh's help in preserving the spirituals, it is also certain that Burleigh need not have participated in the project; he was financially secure and had a comfortable life in New York and the wherewithal to travel somewhat frequently to Europe. It also seems likely, with Burleigh's many African-American contacts in Georgia (including the director of music at Morehouse, Kemper Harreld, and the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Atlanta, Henry H. Proctor), that he could have found numerous informants without enlisting Dorothy Bolton's help. To understand why Harry Burleigh chose to work with Bolton, one needs to explore her biography.

Dorothy Bolton was born in 1880 in Hawthorne, Florida, to John and Sarah "Sadai" Gray. John Gray (1852-1887) was a Methodist minister known, in part, for his evangelical efforts among the freedmen (Bolton 1998, xii). Sadai Gray (1855-1892) descended from the strong-willed and historically significant Dolly Lunt Burge (1817-1891). (4) After Bolton's father died when she was seven, she and four siblings spent an increasing amount of time with their grandmother on the Burge plantation in Mansfield, Georgia. Bolton's grandmother and mother both died when she was twelve years old.

Bolton and her sister Ida were then sent to live with a distant aunt named Cornelia Lunt (1843-1934), whom they barely knew. Cornelia Lunt was the daughter of Orrington Lunt, one of the founders of Northwestern University (the Lunt Library at Northwestern is named for him). Lunt appears to have raised Bolton in a manner similar to her own childhood, which she later discussed in a published memoir, Sketches of Girlhood and Childhood (Lunt 1925). Bolton was well educated for the time. In the late nineteenth century, she attended a boarding school in Boston where she cultivated an abiding appreciation for music. Her surviving letters describe some of the concerts that she regularly attended with her professors. She esteemed opera throughout her life and greatly admired Amy Beach's music (Bolton, Letters 1897-1924). Cornelia Lunt seems to have also impressed upon her young nieces a liberal attitude. In her memoirs, Lunt claims:

   I shook off certain prejudices early, and felt as if certain scales
   in matters of judgment dropped from my eyes. With people of
   opposing views, of widely different beliefs, I grew to feel less
   and less alienation; more of curiosity and of interest. And with
   leaders of widely different faiths ... all in some measure appealed
   as vital and worthy of respect. Jew, Greek, Gentile, or Unbeliever,
   what difference does it make? All have something to teach and
   to give. (239-240).

Cornelia Lunt's family connection to Northwestern and this broadminded outlook likely led to Bolton's attendance there. In 1906, she graduated from the Northwestern School of Speech. At the time, the school was designed to teach rhetoric, oratory, elocution, and related subjects (Rein 1981, 1-23).

Dorothy's husband, Louis Davout Bolton (1877-1953), was a successful engineer and businessman in Detroit, Michigan. While in Detroit, Dorothy and Louis moved in a social circle that included Henry Ford and other top socialites of the city. Louis's inventions and innovations were profitable enough that they enabled him to retire to his wife's old plantation estate while he was in his thirties or forties.

From 1916 until the end of her life, Dorothy lived on the Burge plantation in Mansfield, Georgia. Apparently, she traveled often, making several trips abroad and many more to various cities in the United States. She seems to have spoken some French and may have spoken other languages. In 1946, King George VI of England bestowed a medal for "service in the cause of freedom" upon her and seven other Georgia women (for an unknown reason). She received a handwritten letter from Harry Truman after she congratulated him for the work that he did during his presidency (Bolton, Letters 1898-1950). In her old age, she grew progressively blind and in 1964, at the age of 84, died.

The Old Songs Hymnal has barely left its mark in the wider discussion of spirituals. From compiling and comparing WorldCat and Eureka listings of library holdings, I conclude that U.S. libraries are roughly four times as likely to own Dett's Religious Folk Song of the Negro (1927) and ten times as likely to own the Johnson Brother's books of Negro spirituals (Johnson 1925,1926). As few as 57 copies of the Old Songs Hymnal are held by U.S. libraries. There are only a half dozen or so more that I know exist beyond this total; it is a relatively scarce book. The Old Songs Hymnal remains essentially unknown, and the hundreds of musical transcriptions of spirituals that Burleigh made remain obscure.

As my initial exploration suggests, this facet of Burleigh's life deserves greater scrutiny. True, Burleigh was nothing like a contemporary ethnomusicologist, but he did do field research in the rural South with ex-slaves and first-generation free African Americans who seldom traveled beyond Newton County, Georgia. The songs that Burleigh recorded are firmly rooted in the tradition, and approximately 122 of the songs in the Old Songs Hymnal do not appear in other collections (see App.). As such, it records a sizable portion of African-American traditional music that would have otherwise been "lost." Furthermore, since the geographical region and even some of the names of the singers are known, we can pinpoint this traditional repertoire precisely in order to compare it with other collections. Through Burleigh's efforts, a rich, transitional moment in the history of African-American folk music emerges. More important, our understanding of the aloof elder statesman of the spiritual becomes more complex.

APPENDIX

Comparison of Old Songs Hymnal Tunes to Other Publications of the Spirituals

It is nearly impossible to definitively say that a given spiritual appears in only one of the numerous published collections of spirituals. Text discrepancies alone, from wandering versus and repeated variants of the same text, would often preclude any such conclusion. The possibilities for regional tune variants, or even local variations among different singers, not to mention the varying abilities of transcribers, further undermine an assertion of a song's individuality.

Still, according to the hymnal's foreword, both Bolton and Burleigh sought to capture songs before they disappeared from the oral tradition. Consequently, I attempted to evaluate which of the tunes appearing in the Old Songs Hymnal are unique to this publication. I limited my comparison to the following fourteen important publications, listed chronologically.

Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. 1867. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson & Co.

Pike, Gustavus Dorman. 1873. The Jubilee Singers and Their Campaign for Twenty Thousand Dollars. Boston: Lee and Shepard.

Barton, William Eleazar. 1899. Old Plantation Hymns. Boston, Lamson, Wolffe and Co. (Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972).

Fenner, Thomas P., Frederic G. Rathbun, and Bessie Cleaveland. 1901. Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students. 3rd ed. New York: G. P. Puntam's Sons.

Krehbiel, Henry Edward. 1914. Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music. New York: G. Schrimer. (Reprint, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1967.)

Work, John Wesley. 1915. Folk Song of the American Negro. Nashville: Negro University Press. (Reprinted, New York: Negro University Press, 1969.)

Burlin, Natalie Curtis. 1918-1919. Negro Folk-Songs, The Hampton Series, Books I-IV, Complete. New York: G. Schirmer. (Reprint, Meneola, New York: Dover, 2001.)

Ballanta-Taylor, Nicholas George Julius. 1925. Saint Helena Island Spirituals. New York: G. Schirmer.

Johnson, James Weldon. 1925. The Book of American Negro Spirituals. Introduction by James Weldon Johnson. Musical arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson. Additional numbers by Lawrence Brown. New York: Viking Press.

Scarborough, Dorothy. 1925. On The Trail of Negro Folk-Songs. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. (Reprint, Hatboro, Pennsylvannia: Folklore Associates, 1963.)

Johnson, James Weldon. 1926. The Second Book of American Negro Spirituals. Introduction by James Weldon Johnson. Musical arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson. New York: Viking Press.

Dett, R. Nathaniel. 1927. Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro, As Sung at Hampton Institute. Hampton, VA: Hampton Institute Press. (Reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972.)

Niles, John Jacob. 1929. Seven Negro Exhaltations. New York: G. Schirmer.

McIlhenny, E. A. 1933. Befo' de War Spirituals. Boston: Christopher Publishing House.

I compared the text from the beginning of both the verse and chorus sections of all 187 tunes in the Old Songs Hymnal to the texts of the spirituals found in these collections. In cases where the publication had a table of contents, I compared the Old Songs Hymnal texts to that table of contents. I investigated the music whenever I found a match, or a near match (e.g., "Almost Done"--"I'm Almost Done") in the lyrics. Whenever songs sharing texts also shared a similar melodic contour, I concluded that the Old Songs Hymnal version was not unique. I found a comparison based on melodic incipits unfruitful because of the pervasiveness of certain opening motives (e.g., 5-6-1).

Of course, I sometimes discovered similar tunes with differing texts (e.g., "Rise and Shine" in Jubilee Singers shares a melody with "Pharoah's Daughter" in Old Songs Hymnal) and, more frequently, similar or exactly the same text set to different melodies (e.g., Dett's "De Ole Ark a-Moverin' Along" does not share a melody with "Old Arka a-Moving" in Old Songs Hymnal). Some of the tunes in the Old Songs Hymnal, while firmly within the oral tradition, likely originated in Protestant hymnody. I believe that ten songs had such an origin, and removed them from consideration.

The following chart contains the song number and title of Old Songs Hymnal spirituals to which I found no melodic or text predecessor. I cannot assert that this list contains only "unique" spirituals; however, I do believe that my comparison suggests that Bolton and Burleigh's efforts to preserve some spirituals before they passed from the oral tradition succeeded.

Song No.     Song Title

1            "Hear Train Coming"
2            "Jesus Went on Man's Bond"
4            "I Heard Train Coming"
6            "Adam and Eve Walking in the Garden"
7            "Better Day Coming"
8            "Didn't It Rain"
9            "Ezekial"
12           "H for Hannah, Hallelujah"
13           "I Am the Light of the World"
14           "In the Land"
15           "Job, All Your Children Are Gone"
16           "Jonah"
19           "Mary Come Running on Sunday Morning"
21           "Sabbaths Have No End"
24           "Who Built the Ark (second version)"
27           "A Sinner Man Is so Hard to Believe"
29           "Be Ready When He Come"
30           "Can't Serve God and Mamman"
31           "Get Right and Stay Right"
32           "Plumb the Line"
33           "Die Right and Holy"
35           "God's Got His Eyes on You"
36           "God Is Going to Straight Them"
38           "I Work on Building Too"
39           "Led Old Norah"
40           "In the Lamb Book"
41           "Jesus Is True"
43           "Keep On to Galilee"
44           "Let the Church Go Rolling On"
45           "Keep On to Heaven Anyhow"
47           "Sinner Man, Hunt You a Hiding Place"
48           "You Must Not Be Wrong"
50           "The Fault in You"
51           "You Better Mind"
53           "You Got Jesus"
54           "You Can Go On"
56           "Climbing Up Zion's Hill"
57           "Please Don't Drive Me Away"
58           "Don't God's Children Have a Hard Time"
60           "I Want to Be There"
61           "Do, Lord, Remember Me"
62           "Don't Let It Be Said Too Late"
64           "Jesus, Come This Way"
65           "Little More Faith in Jesus"
67           "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy"
70           "Lord, I Wisht I Had Wings"
72           "Lordy Won't You Come by Here"
74           "Prayer Is the Key"
79           "In the Promised Land"
81           "Got Good Religion"
82           "Wagging Up Zion's Hill"
85           "Jesus Lock the Lion jaw"
86           "Shepherd, Your Lamb Gone Astray"
88           "Blood Done Sign My Name"
89           "Brother, Ain't You Glad"
90           "Go Down in Jordan"
91           "Hunting for My Jesus"
93           "I Got a Key"
94           "I Have a Right to the Tree of Life"
96           "I'm in a Strange Land"
97           "Jesus Know My Heart"
98           "Jesus Listening"
100          "Been Blind But Now I See"
101          "Let Him Come"
103          "Let Your Heart Catch on Fire"
105          "Life-boat"
106          "Rock in a Weary Land"
107          "Newborn Again"
108          "Jesus in the Band"
109          "Sunshine in My Soul"
110          "Tell Me How You Love Jesus"
113          "The Lord Going to Wipe Away These Tears"
114          "There's No Gambling in the Air"
116          "Whiter Than Snow"
119          "Help Me Run, Satan"
121          "Is My Mother on Board"
122          "Don't Cut Him Down"
123          "Death Going to Shake Me"
125          "Is I Got to Linger"
126          "Never Come Back Anymore"
127          "It May Be the Last Time, I Don't Know"
129          "I Ain't No Stranger Now"
131          "Just as Well to Love Me Brother"
132          "Learn Me the Way"
133          "Motherless Children Have a Hard Time"
136          "What You Weeping For, Mary"
137          "You Going to Want Somebody on Your Bond"
139          "Every Year Must Carry Its Number"
140          "You Gonter Miss Me"
142          "Everybody Got to Go"
144          "The Grave Is Dark and Lonesome"
145          "On the Hill"
146          "Calling Them Saint from Mount Zion Hill"
148          "Let Me Take a Ride on the Chariot Wheel"
149          "Home in That Rock"
150          "Got to Go to Judgement"
151          "Hush, Little Baby, Don't You Cry"
153          "Lord, Going to Look on the Book That Day"
154          "My Home"
155          "Sit Down and Rest a Little While"
156          "When I Get Home"
157          "Land on the Shore"
159          "When the Saints March In"
162          "That Great Day"
163          "Mary and Martha, Peter and James"
164          "Won't It Be a Time"
165          "Lord, Lord"
166          "I Have a Mother over Yonder"
167          "And Don't You Want to Go"
168          "Amen"
169          "Blow, Gable"
171          "Won't God's Bosom to Be Your Pillow"
172          "I Hate to Tell You So"
174          "Come On, Mary, and Ring the Bell"
175          "Wake Up the Dead"
176          "Going to Tell God How I Suffered"
177          "If You Don't Meet Jesus"
179          "When I Laid My Burden Down"
180          "City of Refuge"
181          "Watching and Waiting for Me"
182          "Wonder How Long"
186          "A Home in Glory"

Mrs. Jane Williams of Covington, Georgia, provided almost all of the information that I used to reconstruct the lives of the singers of the Old Songs Hymnal. She is a genealogist who specializes in African-American genealogy in the region of Georgia where Dorothy Bolton lived. Her kind help and thorough research has made my research trips to Newton Country, Georgia, incredibly fruitful. The Patricia C. Patterson Award from the Graduate Student Grant Program at the University of Colorado funded my initial research trip to Newton County, Georgia.

REFERENCES

Bolton, Dorothy. 1898-1950. Letters. Held in private collection of Louis "Nick" Bolton in Birmingham, Ala.

--. 1897-1924. Letters. Held in private collection of Sandy Morehouse, Burge Plantation, in Mansfield, Ga.

Bolton, Dorothy, and Harry Burleigh. 1929. Old songs hymnal, words and melodies from the state of Georgia. New York: Century.

Bolton, Louis D., II., ed. and arrang. 1998. From a Georgia plantation, twenty-six spirituals and folk songs. Atlanta: Bolton Press.

--. 2003. Interview with the author. February.

Burge, Dolly Lunt. 1997. The diary of Dolly Lunt Burge: 1848-1879, edited by Christine Jacobsen Carter. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Burleigh, Harry. [ca. 1929]. 565 transcriptions of African American folksong. Held in a private collection in Birmingham, Ala.

Dett, R. Nathaniel. 1927. Religious folk-songs of the Negro, as sung at Hampton Institute. Hampton, V.A.: Hampton Institute Press.

Johnson, James Weldon. 1925. The book of American Negro spirituals. Musical arrangements by J. Rosamond Johnson. Additional numbers by Lawrence Brown. New York: Viking Press.

--. 1926. The second book of American Negro spirituals. New York: Viking Press. Lunt, Cornelia Gray. 1925. Sketches of childhood and girlhood, Chicago 1847-1864. Chicago: The Author.

Morehouse, Sandy. 2003. Telephone conversation with the author. March.

Newton County Historical Society. 1988. History of Newton County Georgia. Covington, Ga: Newton County Historical Society.

Rein, Lynn Miller. 1981. Northwestern University School of Speech: A history. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University School of Speech.

Spencer, Jon Michael. 1997. The new Negroes and their music: The success of the Harlem Renaissance. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Street, Julian. 1917. American adventures. New York: Century.

Walker, William, comp. 1835. The Southern harmony, and musical companion. Philadelphia: Thomas, Cooperthwaite.

Williams, Jane. 2003. Interview with the author, March.

(1.) Both of her grandsons remember her speaking of doing this typing, which would suggest that she worked closely with Harry Burleigh preparing these manuscripts. All of Bolton's extant correspondence was typed, including several personal letters, and one of her grand-nephews remembers that she typed because she was embarrassed about her handwriting.

(2.) For example, "Restoration," from Southern Harmony (1835), appears as song number 34, "Goodbye Gambler," in the Old Song Hymnal.

(3). This reminiscence was shared with Jane Williams (2003).

(4.) Dolly Burge was born in Maine and reared as an abolitionist. She was widowed while teaching in the South, then married Thomas Burge, the owner of one of the larger plantations in Newton County, Georgia. Her story and life is largely documented in her recently published diaries. See Burge (1997).

BRIAN MOON encountered the Old Songs Hymnal while earning a master's degree in Sacred Music and Choral Conducting at Emory University. He later attended the University of Colorado, became a fellow at the American Music Research Center, and pursued a Ph.D. in musicology. He is now an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. Moon's forthcoming dissertation is titled "The Old Songs Hymnah Harry Burleigh and His Spirituals during the Harlem Renassiance."