I'll Fly Away: A Song History

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"I'll Fly Away" is a composed gospel song with a known author: Albert E. Brumley (1905–1977), who was born to a sharecropping family near Spiro, in what was then Indian Territory and is now Oklahoma, and who studied at the Hartford Musical Institute, where students were trained to write gospel songs in shape notes, in Hartford, Arkansas.[1][2] Brumley later said the idea came to him while he was working in the fields and humming "The Prisoner's Song," an earlier country hit sung by a prisoner who longs to escape. He turned the image around, making the world the prison and heaven the escape.[3][4] Accounts differ on the details. The Library of Congress essay by the historian Bill C. Malone has him plowing his father's field and places the start of work in 1929, while Brumley himself, quoted in a 1990 biography, remembered picking cotton in 1928.[3][4] By one account it took him three years to finish.[2] It was published in 1932 by the Hartford Music Company in the shape-note songbook The Wonderful Message.[3][4][5]

Arthur Rothstein photograph of four men in suits singing a hymn in a wooden Baptist church in West Virginia, 1941

Arthur Rothstein, Elders singing hymn at Sunday school, at Baptist church near project. Dailey, West Virginia, photograph, 1941. Farm Security Administration collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication.

The song spread through recordings. The Atlanta preacher Rev. J. M. Gates seems to have been the first to record it, for Bluebird in February 1940, and the Selah Jubilee Singers recorded it for Decca in 1941. The Brumley family's publishing company, however, names the Selah Jubilee Singers as the first.[3][4][5] The Chuck Wagon Gang's 1948 Columbia recording sold more than a million copies and, in Malone's view, did more than any other recording to popularize it with ordinary American listeners. That recording is now in the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry.[3] In the 1940s Brumley started his own publishing firm and later bought the Hartford Music Company, which brought the rights to his best-known song back under his control. The copyright was renewed in 1960 by Albert E. Brumley & Sons.[1][4][6] According to the Brumley company, in 1976 the performing-rights organization SESAC named it the most recorded gospel song in history, and licensed recordings of it now number in the thousands.[5]

The film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) brought the song to a vast new audience. In the movie it is heard in the Kossoy Sisters' version from their 1956 album, while the soundtrack album, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year, features a newer performance by Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.[3][7][8] It has found a place in the mountain dulcimer world too: Stephen Seifert includes it in his mountain dulcimer jam book Join the Jam.[9]

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Sources

  1. CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas: "Albert Edward Brumley (1905–1977)".
  2. Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture: "Brumley, Albert Edward".
  3. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry: "'I'll Fly Away'—The Chuck Wagon Gang (1948)" (essay by Bill C. Malone).
  4. Hymnology Archive: "I'll Fly Away".
  5. Brumley Music: "History".
  6. Hymnary.org: "I'll Fly Away" (tune).
  7. Country Standard Time: "O Kossoy Sisters, where art thou been?" (Jon Johnson, 2003).
  8. Recording Academy, GRAMMY.com: "20 Years Ago, 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Crashed The Country Music Party".
  9. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam DAD Tuning".