The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #48189 Message #4237419
Posted By: GUEST,Phil d'Conch
27-Mar-26 - 09:37 PM
Thread Name: DTStudy: All My Trials, Lord
Subject: RE: DTStudy: All My Trials, Lord
This one came up in Sunday-go-to-meetin' conversation recently. Tis' a ...riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key...
Remedial & state-of-the-art(s) “...The lyrics get changed around from version to version. Some even cut out the first verse "Hush little baby don't you cry/ You know your mama was born to die ..." which is pretty morbid for a goddamn lullaby!
Yes, a lullaby. Practically every source I looked at while researching the song said it came from or might have come from an old "Bahamian lullaby" or perhaps a Bahamian "spiritual." One dubious source even referred to it as a "Jamaican slave song."
But when I set out trying to find out where the darn thing came from, I kept running into a brick wall. I couldn't find anything definite. No accounts of Nassau sailors singing it to delighted British journalists. Not even any Youtubes with Bahamian singers. (And I seriously wanted to find a crazed, incomprehensible version by Joseph Spence to post here!) Seems like Alan Lomax or somebody should have stumble across some mama in the Bahamas trying to put her kid to sleep with something like this.
It turns out that another blogger (and fellow podcaster and fellow musician and fellow DJ) who wanted to explore "All My Trials" ran into the same problems. Jim Moran of Comparative Video 101 wrote:
It turned out that "All My Trials" is of extremely uncertain pedigree, and the chances seem very good that the "folk" song was in fact assembled from fragments of earlier spirituals to sound like a traditional song when it was set to a mysterious Bahamian lullaby that no one really seems ever to have heard or bothered to record.”