Jesus Walked That Lonesome Valley: A Song History
Most hymnals list "Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley" as an American folk hymn, a few call it an African American spiritual, and its origins remain obscure.[1] Hymnologist C. Michael Hawn suggests it may blend Appalachian folk song with the African American spiritual, and he observes that the Appalachian variants do not mention Jesus.[1] Folklorist George Pullen Jackson held that white folk hymns were the source of the spirituals, a view that many scholars, Bernice Johnson Reagon among them, have challenged.[1]
John Dillwyn Llewelyn, The Lonely Glen, salted paper print, 1853–56. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The earliest trace in the sources consulted here comes from 1862, when Charlotte Forten, a free Black woman from Philadelphia, heard first schoolchildren and later adults on St. Helena Island sing "Down in the Lonesome Valley."[1] A melodically distinct variant, "The Lonesome Valley," appeared as No. 7 in Slave Songs of the United States (1867), compiled by Allen, Ware, and Garrison.[1] Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag (1927) cites the spiritual, and George Pullen Jackson's Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America includes a version he recorded in 1933 at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.[1]
The Carter Family recorded "Lonesome Valley" for Victor in Memphis on November 24, 1930, and the label credits A. P. Carter, whom the discography lists as arranger.[2] Woody Guthrie recorded the song for the Library of Congress in 1940.[1] According to Hawn, it entered American hymnals only in the second half of the twentieth century and is not found in African American hymnals.[1] Hymnary.org now counts it in 63 hymnals.[3]
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