Thanks Joe for updating this thread; I've been singing this haunting song since I heard Anna and Elizabeth perform it on their CD. The Sing Out! article by Patrick Blackman does some brilliant digging into the roots of the song in the antebellum culture of enslaved African-Americans.

What Patrick Blackman missed however is following the trail of the song to Vermont where Margaret MacArthur recorded it from Hildreth Brown in 1961. This website Women of Berlin NH explains that Hildreth Brown and her aunt Caroline Lewis Gordon (Mrs Orton B Brown) were respectively the granddaughter and daughter of the Confederate General John B. Gordon who had owned the "ancestral plantation Flint River Plantation" referred in Margaret MacArthur's notes.

Caroline Lewis Gordon was born in 1871 and wrote about her postbellum youth in Georgia in an unpublished book from which Hildreth Brown published excerpts in The Georgia Review, Vol.14, No.1 (Spring 1960) which can be read through JSTOR* at The Georgia Review: Plantation Life with General John B. Gordon. In these extracts Gordon describes Beechwood, the fourteen thousand acre plantation on the Flint River near Reynolds in southern Georgia, and how she collected spirituals and dance songs from the "Negroes" on this plantation. She sang these songs for her [white] friends and in public performances until her marriage. It is this collection of songs that she passed on to her niece Hildreth Brown, who sang them for Margaret MacArthur.

The songs, including Mother in the Graveyard, can thus be dated back to at least the 1880s or 1870s to African Americans who were formerly slaves, or descended from slaves, owned by the Gordon family. The songs were preserved by the Gordon family, but this does go to show some of the complex racial and cultural history behind them.

There is a lot more to add, especially about General John B. Gordon, but that can wait for another post.

Matthew Edwards

* It is worth registering for a JSTOR personal account for free online access to some of their content.