Long Time Traveling: A Song History
"Long Time Traveling" is less a single fixed hymn than a group of related Southern religious folk songs: what they share is a chorus about a long journey away from home, usually joined to imagery of heavenly mansions, while the verses shift from one singer to the next.[1] Its first stanza is borrowed from Isaac Watts's "When I Can Read My Title Clear," which Hymnary.org dates to his Hymns and Spiritual Songs of 1707.[1][2] Shape-note tunebooks matched the words to several different melodies.[1] In the Sacred Harp tradition it is sung to the tune "White," credited to Edmund Dumas and dated 1856, which still appears in the 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp as number 288.[3][4] The tune takes its name from Benjamin Franklin White, who compiled the first edition of The Sacred Harp in 1844.[3]
Arthur Wesley Dow, The Long Road – Argilla Road, Ipswich, color woodcut, ca. 1898–1912. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.
The earliest dated version in the Traditional Ballad Index is a 1927 Gennett record by J. T. Allison's Sacred Harp Singers, followed in 1928 by Sacred Harp groups recording related versions under the tune names "Primrose Hill" and "The Ninety-Fifth."[1] Jean Ritchie recorded it as "Been a Long Time A-Travelling" on her 1956 Riverside album Saturday Night and Sunday Too.[3] Frank Proffitt recorded it in 1965, and according to later notes by Jeff Warner, Proffitt said his father, Wiley, may have learned it from singers at a Black church.[3] Almeda Riddle of Heber Springs, Arkansas, recorded her version in 1972.[3] The Ballad Index also passes along a report that the song was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln, a claim best treated as tradition rather than established fact.[1]
The song found a second life among folk revival singers.[3] Peter Bellamy learned it from the 1927 Allison recording and sang it with the Watersons on the 1979 Topic album Both Sides Then, and many other revival performers have recorded it since.[3]
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