Bright Morning Stars: A Song History

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"Bright Morning Stars" is an anonymous American religious folk song.[1] A possible early trace is a Library of Congress field recording catalogued as "Bright Morning Stars Are Rising," made by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax from the singer G. D. Vowell in Harlan County, Kentucky, in September 1937.[2][3] The Traditional Ballad Index classes it as a religious non-ballad from the southeastern United States and lists a related text collected in the Blue Ridge in 1957, while its editor doubts that the familiar title is traditional, having adopted it from revival performances.[1] A note by Charles and Peggy Seeger, drawing on the Library of Congress archive and quoted by Mainly Norfolk, finds the words typical of shape-note hymns, especially in the way they address father, mother and other kin.[4]

Watercolor of the sun rising over a low, flat landscape, its rays spreading across a pale cloudy sky

Joseph Michael Gandy, Landscape with rising sun, December 1, 1828, 8:30 a.m., watercolor over graphite, 1828. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A sunrise, shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The song reached a wider public through the Seeger family: Ruth Crawford Seeger included it in her 1953 songbook American Folk Songs for Christmas, and Peggy, Barbara and Penny Seeger recorded it for a 1957 album of the same name.[4][5] Mountain singers kept it in circulation as well, among them Nimrod Workman, recorded at Chattaroy, West Virginia, in 1976; Mark Wilson's notes to that recording also point to a 1971 recording by Ralph Stanley.[4] British revivalists took it up too, among them the Young Tradition, who said they learned it in Washington, DC, while on tour.[4]

The Canadian trio the Wailin' Jennys named their 2011 Red House album after it, the only song on the record they did not write themselves, and a review in The Uniter singled out their unaccompanied version of the title track for praise.[6][7] It also appears, in an arrangement by James A. Lucas, in the 1993 hymnal Singing the Living Tradition, and Elizabeth Mitchell included it on The Sounding Joy, her 2013 Smithsonian Folkways tribute to Ruth Crawford Seeger's Christmas collection.[5][8]

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Sources

  1. Traditional Ballad Index: "Bright Morning Stars (For the Day Is A-Breakin' In My Soul)".
  2. Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings (University of Kentucky, Berea College, American Folklife Center, Association for Cultural Equity): "Bright Morning Stars Are Rising".
  3. Association for Cultural Equity: "AFS 1379".
  4. Mainly Norfolk: "Bright Morning Star".
  5. Smithsonian Folkways: "The Sounding Joy" liner notes.
  6. Songlines: "Bright Morning Stars" (review).
  7. The Uniter: "The Wailin' Jennys" (review, 24 March 2011).
  8. Hymnary.org: "Bright Morning Stars" (Singing the Living Tradition, 357).