Handwritten notes by Margaret MacArthur on the envelope for tape reel “OT2003-3004,” 1961, Vermont Folklife Center Digital Collections.

Introduction – “Mother in the Graveyard…”

Today we only have time for a swim instead of a deep dive.  Nonetheless, the water is tempting.  While eagerly checking out the songs on Anna and Elizabeth’s 2018 album, The Invisible Comes to Us, one title and some lyrics first caught my attention. “Mother in the Graveyard” certainly sounds like a song to which murder ballad bloggers might be attracted. However, it is neither a ballad nor a song about explicit violence.

It takes a bit of digging to reveal the truth here. First, though, honor the beauty of art.  That’s why we do all this virtual blathering, after all. Please listen, watch, and enjoy their lovely official video for the song, produced by Jacob Blumberg…

Mother in the graveyard and I’m on the land, look for me
Mother in the graveyard and I’m on the land
And I want God’s bosom to be my pillow
Hide me over in the rocks of ages
Look for me

I am climbing Jacob’s ladder, look for me
I am climbing Jacob’s ladder
And I want God’s bosom to be my pillow
Hide me over in the rocks of ages
Look for me

See Brother Peter when you get to the Kingdom, look for me
See Brother Peter when you get to the Kingdom
And I want God’s bosom to be my pillow
Hide me over in the rocks of ages
Look for me

Drive that chariot to my door, look for me
Drive the chariot to my door
And I want God’s bosom to be my pillow
Hide me over in the rocks of ages
Look for me

Many of the detailed reviews of the album I’ve encountered make mention of, or link to, this performance. Good God, why wouldn’t they? The best I’ve found so far is Bob Boilen’s, from NPR’s All Songs Considered.  You’ll get at least a blog’s worth of pleasure simply listening to this extended interview with the artists.  To my point here though, in writing the introduction to the premiere for the video above, Boilen quotes Anna Roberts-Gevalt.

“This old hymn from Vermont kept inspiring images of a figure in endless wandering. So we wandered until the sun came up, cold and tired, over Brighton Beach, the spot we like to go in Brooklyn to take long looks at the horizon.”

Such clear and creative vision is wonderful. However, Roberts-Gevalt makes what I believe to be an understandable but crucial mistake in sourcing “Mother in the Graveyard.”  There is bright truth here – it’s just hidden, by accident, in plain sight.  That can happen when great musicians make old sound into something new and beautiful.

“I’m on the land…”

I‘ll take music over history any day, but there is some humble enlightenment from the latter to be gained here.

One reviewer labels Anna and Elizabeth’s track “a straight folk song, but on closer inspection, even this is littered with unexpected twinkles and miniature musical soundscapes.”  Another calls it “the old hymn “Mother In The Graveyard,” which is given a hypnotic, one-chord treatment as the singer longs to join her mother in heaven.”  The musical assessments are more or less accurate, to my ear at least.

Old Folkways Records logo

As for history though, some reviewers highlight the fact that the artists gathered many tracks on the album from the northeastern United States, particularly Vermont.  Robert Sullivan makes this a central point in his consideration of the album, and invites a good deal of racial and political context to the mix.  Indeed, the album is a Folkways release – certainly a label that’s never shied away from illuminating such issues in the music they publish.

This song, particularly, touches all of that; perhaps more so than the artists intended.  What do I mean?

On a simple level “Mother in the Graveyard” is indeed “a straight folk song” and an “old hymn” of a sort.  As well, it certainly climbs into this century by way of 20th century step stones in Vermont, as you’ll see below.  None of these facts, though, get to the core identity of the song.

For example, calling it “the old hymn” suggests it has some sort of established place in collections of spirituals.  I’ve not had the time to make a truly exhaustive search, but I cannot find it any place I’d expect to see such a record.  The lyrics include familiar lines from “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Rock of Ages,” but even so it is clearly not a direct derivation of either.  It is something wholly other.

A determined scratch at the surface of the song’s alleged provenance in Vermont, and its legacy at Folkways Records, establishes that this is certainly not a folk song of New England.  The available evidence proves that this is southern African-American music, and it suggests the song originated in the era of antebellum slavery.

“Look for me…”

In their album’s liner notes, Anna and Elizabeth cite their source material for “Mother in the Graveyard” as residing in The Margaret MacArthur Collection of The Vermont Folklife Center.  We are lucky that MacArthur’s field recording is available digitally from that archive.  Give it a listen here!

The singer is Hildreth Brown, performing for MacArthur and her reel to reel tape machine in November, 1961.  But the online catalog entry for the track gives us little more than this information and a transcription of the lyrics.

Luckily, we can get deeper with a bit more effort.  The archive makes available both a link to other performances by Brown and a link to an image of the envelope which contain the tape reel in question.  Both reveal something, but the handwritten notes made directly on the latter give us clear provenance:

“Hildreth Brown of Hancock, N.H. at Brattleboro Retreat Nov 20, 1961 singing songs collected by her late aunt Caroline Lewis Gordon (Mrs. Orton B. Brown) 1871-194(?) from negroes in their ancestral plantation Flint River Plantation in Georgia.

The notes go on to list Brown’s twelve performances on the tape, presumably all songs learned from her aunt Caroline.  Interestingly, the handwritten title for the source of our featured track is “Mudder in de grabeyard.”  When you put that note together with the way Brown sings the lyrics, there is little doubt she was mimicking what she understood to be southern African-American dialect.  The other songs she performed, such as “Georgia Buck,” are also clearly examples of southern black music – albeit two generations removed to New England.

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