The Church In The Wildwood: A Song History

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"The Church in the Wildwood," also sung as "The Little Brown Church" or "The Little Brown Church in the Vale," is credited in words and music to William Savage Pitts (1830–1918), a New York–born music teacher who wrote for singing schools and brass bands in Wisconsin and later practiced medicine for decades in Fredericksburg, Iowa.[1][2] The familiar origin story holds that in 1857, while traveling to see his fiancée, Pitts stopped at the village of Bradford, Iowa, pictured a church in a wooded valley along the Cedar River, and wrote the song; returning years later, he supposedly found a congregation raising a brown church on that very spot, and his singing class performed the piece at its dedication.[1][2] Historian Christopher D. Cantwell has shown how fragile that tale is: Pitts himself recounted it to a journalist in 1896, the minister who led the building project never mentioned Pitts or the song in his recollections, and the academy where Pitts reportedly taught seems to date from after the church's dedication in December 1864.[3]

Black-and-white photograph of the front of a small wooden church with a bell tower among trees

The Little Brown Church in the Vale, Nashua, Iowa, east front. Historic American Buildings Survey photograph. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Pitts sold the song to the Chicago publisher H. M. Higgins in 1865, reportedly for $25 at the time he entered Rush Medical College.[2][3] As Cantwell points out, it began life as a sentimental love ballad rather than a hymn, with an original verse mourning a lost sweetheart, and before 1900 it turned up in college songbooks (the Yale Glee Club even added a verse of its own in 1882) but in no Protestant hymnal.[3] Its second life came in the twentieth century: Bradford had faded after the railroad favored nearby Nashua, and in 1900 local people formed a society to save the old church; the Weatherwax brothers, a quartet from Charles City, Iowa, sang the song on the Chautauqua circuit and joined evangelist Billy Sunday in 1914; and after E. O. Excell's 1910 arrangement, about a third of Protestant hymnals included it within two decades.[3] By 1919 the church itself had become a favorite place to marry, and Hymnary.org now indexes the song in more than 220 hymnals.[3][1]

The Carter Family recorded it for Victor in 1932, and the side was issued as Victor 23776 and later on the Montgomery Ward label.[4] Later singers from June Carter Cash, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton to Ella Fitzgerald and the band Alabama took it up, and it turned up on The Andy Griffith Show in 1963.[3] For mountain dulcimer players, Stephen Seifert includes it among the hymn and gospel favorites in Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[5]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "The Little Brown Church".
  2. Hymnary.org: "W. S. Pitts".
  3. Loyola eCommons / Church History: Christopher D. Cantwell, "Evangelicalism, Nostalgia, and the History of an American Hymn" (2023).
  4. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "The Church in the Wildwood; Keep on the Sunny Side".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".