Pleasant Walk: A Song History

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"Pleasant Walk" is a Shaker tune that the Traditional Tune Archive describes as a laboring air sung at the Shaker community of Hancock, Massachusetts, around 1857.[1] In an essay on the Shaker song tradition, Daniel W. Patterson describes the dances and marches of Shaker worship as "laboring exercises."[2] From the 1820s onward, he notes, about six kinds of march came into use, each accompanied by songs of its own.[2] The archive gives the tune in 6/8 time and the Dorian mode, in two parts that are each repeated.[1]

Long plain wooden Shaker bench with a single back rail

United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (Shakers), Bench, pine, 1825–50. Shaker furniture, shown for the tune's Shaker origin.

The opening of the melody is older than its Shaker use: according to the archive, a variant of the first strain of "Cuba March," a march in 6/8 time, was used for the Shaker air.[3] The archive counts the 1777 fife book of Giles Gibbs of Ellington, Connecticut, a fifer in the Revolutionary War, among the first places that march turns up under that title.[3] Writing in 1942, Edward Deming Andrews observed that Shaker songs, at first improvised and passed on by ear, later took tunes from English hymns, from Irish, Scottish, French and Bohemian folk music, and from the popular songs and dances of the time.[4]

The archive lists a recording of the tune on Tree of Life, issued by Gourd Music.[1] Gourd Music's page for that album offers a clip of "Pleasant Walk" and presents the record as a companion to its Simple Gifts, with Barry Phillips, William Coulter and other musicians once again reviving Shaker music.[5] Shelley Stevens includes "Pleasant Walk," dated circa 1857, in Baker's Dozen #4: Shaker Music, a book of traditional Shaker melodies in DAD tuning with standard notation and dulcimer tablature, published by Fingers Of Steel.[6]

Our book that contains the song "Pleasant Walk"

Sources

  1. Traditional Tune Archive: "Pleasant Walk (The)".
  2. Folkstreams: "The Shaker Song Tradition" (Daniel W. Patterson).
  3. Traditional Tune Archive: "Cuba March (The)".
  4. Internet Archive: "The Dance in Shaker Ritual" (Edward Deming Andrews, Dance Index, April 1942).
  5. Gourd Music: "Shaker Music".
  6. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Baker's Dozen #4: Shaker Music".
  7. Image: United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing (Shakers), Bench, pine, 1825–50. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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