Poor Wayfaring Stranger: A Song History

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"Poor Wayfaring Stranger" is an anonymous American folk hymn in which a weary traveler, passing through a world of trouble, looks ahead to crossing the Jordan into a heavenly home.[1][2] Hymnary.org dates the first printing of its words to Bever's Christian Songster of 1858,[1] while the Traditional Ballad Index traces the song back further, to Kentucky Harmony in 1816, where it appears under the title "Judgement."[2] Sources differ on its deeper roots: hymnals variously describe it as a folk spiritual, an American folk hymn or simply a traditional melody, and at least one hymnal, Christian Worship, credits the tune to William Walker's Southern Harmony (1835).[1][3]

Graphite and gray wash drawing of a lone traveler among tall woodland trees

John Sell Cotman, Traveler in a Woodland Landscape, 1806. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Shape-note singers kept the hymn in circulation, and The Sacred Harp carries it in an arrangement by John M. Dye dated 1935.[4] In the same year the collector Annabel Morris Buchanan noted it down from Mrs. G. L. Collins of Burkesville, Kentucky, publishing it in Folk Hymns of America (1938).[5] Wider fame came through Burl Ives, who took "The Wayfaring Stranger" as his performing name; by his own account, his first network radio broadcast under that billing, in May 1940, was cut off by news of the fall of France.[6] His 1941 debut album on Okeh bore the same name, but the song itself was first issued on his 1944 album for Asch, and it became one of his signature pieces.[6] Columbia was still reissuing an Ives LP called The Wayfaring Stranger in 1955.[7]

Recordings by Horton Barker, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Almeda Riddle and Pete Seeger are among those the Ballad Index lists; its editors note the song's unusually strong hold on the folk revival, and they observe that Schinhan, in his notes to the Brown collection, discusses the oddities of its tune at unusual length.[2] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[8]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Wayfaring Stranger" (text).
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Wayfaring Stranger".
  3. Hymnary.org: "WAYFARING STRANGER" (tune).
  4. Hymnary.org: "The Sacred Harp (1991 rev.) 457".
  5. Hymnary.org: "Folk Hymns of America 36".
  6. Association for Cultural Equity: "Burl Ives".
  7. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "The Wayfaring Stranger".
  8. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".