Beautiful Home: A Song History

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"Beautiful Home" is one of the songs recorded by the Carter Family that Jim Miller arranged for dulcimer, and his book credits it to "J. Howard Entwisle & J. Oatman, 1898"; that authorship and date are the book's own credit.[1] Hymnary.org's entry for a J. Howard Entwisle (1865–1901) describes a Pennsylvania-born Philadelphia musician who edited songbooks in the 1890s and promoted gospel songs alongside William J. Kirkpatrick.[2] The book gives the lyricist only by initial and surname and does not say whether he is Johnson Oatman Jr., though Hymnary.org does show an Oatman Jr. text, "Thinking of Home," set to an Entwisle tune in Praise Hymns and Full Salvation Songs in 1898.[1][3]

Painting of a cottage among tall trees beside a sandy road under a cloudy sky, with small figures on the road

Meindert Hobbema, A Cottage in the Woods, oil on canvas, c. 1662. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

Jim Miller's 15 Tunes In The Public Domain Recorded By The Carter Family, Volume 1, which sets the song in DGD tuning, offers fifteen solo mountain dulcimer arrangements with tablature, lyrics and chord symbols, and is published by Fingers Of Steel.[1]

Our book that contains the song "Beautiful Home"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "Jim Miller, 15 Tunes In The Public Domain Recorded By The Carter Family, Volume 1".
  2. Hymnary.org: "J. Howard Entwisle".
  3. Hymnary.org: "Thinking of Home" (Praise Hymns and Full Salvation Songs, 1898).
  4. Image: Meindert Hobbema, A Cottage in the Woods, oil on canvas, c. 1662. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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