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Margaret MacArthur actually recorded a version of “Mother in the Graveyard” for her album, released in 1963 by Folkways Records, Folk Songs of Vermont sung by Margaret MacArthur.  Her liner notes make clear that “Mother in the Graveyard” is not what the overall album title circumstantially suggests.

Notice there is a discrepancy in the language between these liner notes and MacArthur’s original notes from the tape reel envelope.  Gordon, if her birth year is listed correctly, could not possibly have learned songs “from slaves” in a direct sense.  The original notes must then be more precise in stating that Gordon collected the music from black folks living along the Flint River on the old “ancestral” plantation.  Depending on when she was there to hear, Gordon’s sources in some cases could reasonably have been from the elder generation of emancipated people who survived plantation slavery.  More likely, she collected some of these songs from their hard-pressed children or grandchildren.

In either case, the dozen African-American songs on the reel passed through two generations of New Englanders before Caroline Gordon’s niece Hildreth sang them for MacArthur a full one hundred years after the start of the Civil War.  We can be sure then only that “Mother in the Graveyard” was collected from black folks in Georgia.  Pegging its origin, though, to black folks in the era of antebellum slavery leaves us at best in the realm of educated guesses.

“Meet Brother Peter when you get to the Kingdom…”

So is this originally the music of enslaved people?  It’s possible that “Mother in the Graveyard” was a white hymn that black Georgians adapted from whole cloth to their own purposes, before or after the Civil War.  I haven’t found such a source, but that isn’t proof enough.  However, everything about the lyrics to me suggests a more creative origin, with black folks using bits and pieces of white religious lyrics to create something wholly new.  Without any evidence of an Anglo-American hymn as a source, I’m going to proceed based on that supposition.

Coded lyrics, spiritual or otherwise, are a well-known feature of black antebellum music.  As Dr. Julius Lester wrote in his seminal work To Be A Slave-

“The slave had many means of resisting the dehumanizing effects of slavery.  Religion became one of them.  It became a purifying force in the life of the slaves, a release from the everyday misery.  And through the religious songs they made up from Biblical stories, they expressed their real feelings about slavery.”

Such lyrical sophistication endured in a good deal of African-American music well after the Civil War, of course.  We’ve considered it several times in this blog.  If the lyrics of “Mother in the Graveyard” include multiple layers of meaning, that alone doesn’t narrow down the approximate date of origin.

If, however, this song is from the antebellum period and more than a simple hymn, what else could it be saying?  Coded lyrics in black antebellum music were hyper-adaptive and creative.  Meaning could change from place to place, and even situation to situation for the same singer.  There is no easy decryption matrix to be applied.  We’ve got to go out a limb to even begin to talk about it.  Nonetheless, it’s an exciting risk to take.

Anna and Elizabeth saw “Mother in the Graveyard” as an expression of “endless wandering,” and that evocation very well could be at the heart of it.  One could easily sing or hear it as an extended metaphor of suffering in the wilderness of slavery, or of living black in the Jim Crow south.  In fact, it could be even more.

Enslaved people attempted physical escape in every imaginable situation. They particularly did so when they had no direct kin to leave behind. If we consider that this may also function as a song of literal escape, with the singer really being a runaway “on the land,” the lyrics still make great sense. The singer hides in the rocks with no pillow but God’s bosom, climbs Jacob’s ladder to Heaven, and is going to meet Peter when arriving at the Kingdom.  We know Heaven was often code for escaping to Freedom, whether spiritual, intellectual, or physical. It’s possible then that literal escape from slavery is one appropriate context for “Mother in the Graveyard.”

There’s really no way to know for sure, though a solid period of concentrated scholarship might bring us closer.  I don’t have time for all that now, and I’d rather listen to more music anyway.  However, I do feel safe in saying at least that, on the surface, “Mother in the Graveyard” fits several patterns we see in antebellum black spirituals.

Coda – “When the World’s on Fire”

As I said, I searched to find out if this was “the old hymn” that one reviewer supposedly recognized. After coming up empty with simple tactics, I did multiple lyric string searches, line by line, to find matches.  One song kept providing hits.  Thus far, it’s the only thing that comes close to looking like “Mother in the Graveyard” in more than a passing way. It’s a whopper, too, and could throw everything I said in the section above up in the air. Or it helps make the case, depending on how you see it.

Lyrics for The Carter Family – When the World’s on Fire

The lyric similarities are undeniable.  Note that the Carter Family’s line is clearly “Hide me over in the Rock of Ages” not “Tide me over …” as the lyric link above transcribes it.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this white religious music is indeed “the old hymn,” but such does not seem to be the case.  For one thing, I haven’t yet found an obvious record of it before The Carter Family’s 1930 recording.  As well, the few scraps of the song that show up after that all suggest that this is, indeed, an older black spiritual.

John Lomax made a field recording of the black preacher Mose “Clear Rock” Platt singing it after a prayer, in Texas in 1939.  Vance Randolph collected it as “My Lovin’ Father” from a professor of English, Dr. George Hastings, in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1941.  However, Hastings told Randolph that he “learned this piece from a Negro cook.”  William A. Owens collected it that same year in Kingsville, Texas, from Fanny Givens.  She called it “Oh My Lovin’ Brothuh.”  Owens cataloged it as an Afro-American Spiritual.  Byron Arnold collected “When the World’s on Fire” in the late 1940’s from George Bryant of Bayou La Batre, Alabama.  Bryant told Arnold “I learned this from Aunt Polly, our Negro nurse.”

Consider all this alongside the fact that A.P Carter spent a good deal of time collecting and playing music with Lesley Riddle after they met in the late 1920’s.  Riddle was a black musician from North Carolina, and he deserves a great deal of credit for collaborating with A.P. Carter.  We know he had a profound influence in shaping The Carter Family’s repertoire.  Ken looked into this relationship once before in our blog when considering the tune “On a Hill Lone and Gray.”  Without more research I can’t yet prove it, but the facts seem to point to a compelling possibility.  “When the World’s on Fire” is likely an older African-American spiritual that Riddle helped bring to A.P. Carter’s attention.

What that hymn’s connection may be to “Mother in the Graveyard” is a subject for yet another day’s (or year’s) research.  There’s certainly enough there to compel such an effort.  One can obviously see being black in the antebellum or Jim Crow south as living in ‘a world on fire,’ full of great loss and suffering.  There are obvious layers of meaning there.  The two songs as we hear them today may have grown as branches from the same trunk.

Now we’re beyond even educated guessing, so it’s time to stop!  It’s curious though that our journey began with an obscure song recorded for Folkways Records and ends with a classic Carter Family recording that almost certainly was the melodic inspiration for “This Land is Your Land.”  (Go back and listen if you didn’t!)  Have we come full circle, from the outstanding contemporary musicians Anna and Elizabeth back to a founding father of modern folk music, the most famous Folkways recording artist, Woody Guthrie?

We’ll have to find that out on another day as well, but it’s a fun thought to entertain.  I know Woody would have run with it, whether it was true or not.

Thanks for reading and listening this week, folks!