Wayfarin

Subject: Wayfarin Stranger
From:
Date: 08 Jan 98 - 10:57 AM

I am looking for a little history on the song I Am A Wayfarin Stranger

Subject: RE: Wayfarin
From: Joe Offer
Date: 09 Jan 98 - 03:40 AM

Try a search with "wayfarin" or "wayfaring," and you'll come up with this.
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Wayfarin
From: Joe Offer
Date: 09 Jan 98 - 03:57 AM

In the Burl Ives song Book, there's this commentary:

The great religious revival in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas brought forth many folk hymns whose subject matter was a personal religious experience. The religious revival meetings were just this. The first verse of this song, of a more general nature, is more often sung than the religious second and third verses.
The first Camp Meeting was held in the year 1801. Presbyterians and Methodists together held a tremendous meeting in Kentucky which set the revival style. Here the custom of the Mourner's Bench where penitents publicly confessed their sins to the congregation and were prayed over was insitiuted.

I wish old Burl had told us a little more about this particular song. What he said was interesting, but kind of broad.
-Joe offer-

Subject: RE: Wayfarin
From: dulcimer
Date: 09 Jan 98 - 08:30 AM

Lomax in Folk Song USA says the song "falls into the category of a religious ballad, a song for solo performance at a religious meeting or for a group singing only a a shaped-note singin'." He preceeds this quote with a discussion of the movement Joe described, drawing from the study by G.P. Jackson White and Negro Spirituals. Lomax says songs like this were to express the soaring emotions of the religious radicals. These people drew tunes from ballads, jigs, marches, lovesongs and dressed them up with appropriate solemn texts which spoke directly to their problems and woes. So probably this song has a tune buried somewhere the music of Celtic countries or England. Maybe someone can recognize it as one of those tunes. Sorry to be no more help.

Subject: RE: Wayfarin
From: Jerry Friedman
Date: 09 Jan 98 - 03:30 PM

The tune isn't that different from the one for "John Riley" in a songbook that I don't have here. (And that isn't that different from the one in the DT under "Riley", not "Reilly"--though it sounded so strange in the DT that I wonder whether there's some error somewhere.)

Subject: RE: Wayfarin
From: dulcimer
Date: 09 Jan 98 - 09:29 PM

The tune in the DT is the same as I find in Ozark Folksongs. Randolph relates this to The Maiden in the Garden (p. 258) which he claims was originally The Sailor's Return. The tune he gives for The Maiden is very close to Wayfarin.