Good folks,

I loved the song De Massa Ob De Sheepfol' ever since I first heard it sung by Dr. Jerry Epstein at Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts. Sing Out! magazine had printed it some time earlier---just the lyric--in a column---but still with the heavy dialect included. I thought it interesting, and a good document of another time and place---and, as such, ought to be saved in an archive like the Archive Of Folk Song at the Library Of Congress.

Later, when I learned the song, I did it based on Jerry Epstein's sung version the first time I'd heard it. It would've sounded totally outrageous, I felt, for me to even begin to sing the song like I was some vaudeville black-faced Eddie Cantor.

Master Of The Sheepfold is what I called it. I thought I was correct in doing what I did. I did what I had to in order to live with myself---and to do my part in bringing a fine song forward to more of the folk revival in the USA. Some say it is religious, but I see it as a song about INCLUSION -- the opposite of exclusion. Therefore it cannot be about organized religion as that is exemplified on this planet.

Years later, old friend Cindy Mangsen found the original poem called De Massa Ob De Sheepfol' by the poet Sarah Pratt McLean Greene---born in Connecticut in the 1800s--died in Massachusetts in 1932. This original lyric, without any tune yet, was in the heavy caricature dialect that whites thought blacks, at best, actually were enunciating. At worst this dialect was yet another way to poke fun at, and/or heap derision and hate on the entire Negro race.

This week I found the song at a website dedicated to the wonders that are SHEEP in just about any shape or form. (I can see the old western cattlemen spinning in their graves! ;-) There is a wonderful full color painting of a flock of sheep basking in the warm light lowering rays of the sun along with the words.

(I get mentioned as their source, although they say I attributed the song to "someone in Maine"---which I did not. I said that some earlier carriers of the song learned it from BILL BONYUN in Maine. Unfortuneately, this misquote is from our own Mudcat DIGITAL TRADITION.--Hint, hint, Dick Greenhaus.

Possibly intentionally, the sheep on the highest point of land is the darkest in color.

Check it out at:

http://www.ramshornstudio.com.sheepfold_m.htm

Enjoy! It's a nice song with a moral---about some sheep!!   ;-)

Art Thieme