Motherless Child: A Song History

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"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" is an African American spiritual, and a university teaching guide on American song notes that its origins cannot be pinned down with certainty.[1] The earliest printing found in the sources consulted here is in Old Plantation Hymns (Boston, 1899) by the minister William E. Barton, who heard such songs while living in the South in the 1880s.[1][2] Barton wrote the song down from an older woman he calls Aunt Dinah and counted it among the most moving he had ever heard.[2] He also recalled a jubilee concert whose leader, a veteran of the original Fisk company, introduced a song that a singer recently arrived from Mississippi had brought, one her grandparents had sung in slavery; Barton judged it an incomplete form of Aunt Dinah's song, missing its climax.[2] The spiritual was included in the 1901 edition of Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students, the Hampton students being an ensemble patterned on the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and musicologist Felicia Miyakawa credits that printing with establishing it as a standard of the spiritual repertoire.[3]

A broad lake between low bluffs under a pale blue sky, seen from a grassy shore

Robert S. Duncanson, View of Lake Pepin, Minnesota, oil on canvas, 1862. A landscape by the nineteenth-century African American painter Robert S. Duncanson; it has no connection to the song.

The song went on to become a favorite of art-music arrangers and performers, and Harry T. Burleigh's arrangement of it is dated 1918.[3][4] Paul Robeson recorded it for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on 7 January 1926, with Lawrence Brown at the piano and credited as arranger; it was issued on Victor 20013.[5] Marian Anderson recorded Brown's arrangement in Paris in November 1937, accompanied by Kosti Vehanen.[6] At Woodstock in 1969, Richie Havens improvised a song he called "Freedom (Motherless Child)" around words from the spiritual.[7]

Larry Conger sets it in DAD tuning with a capo at the first fret in Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs, a Fingers Of Steel collection of classic gospel tunes for mountain dulcimer that comes with an MP3 recording of each song.[8]

Our books that contain the song "Motherless Child"

Sources

  1. Voices Across Time (University of Pittsburgh): "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child".
  2. Internet Archive: William E. Barton, "Old Plantation Hymns" (1899).
  3. Journal of the Society for American Music: Felicia M. Miyakawa, "'A Long Ways from Home?' Hampton Institute and the Early History of 'Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child'".
  4. Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Library: "Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child," arranged by H. T. Burleigh.
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-34077. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / Paul Robeson".
  6. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Gramophone matrix 0LA2187. Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / Marian Anderson ; Kosti Vehanen".
  7. Hampton University Museum: "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child".
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs".
  9. Image: Robert S. Duncanson, View of Lake Pepin, Minnesota, oil on canvas, 1862. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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