Walk Around My Bedside: A Song History
"Walk Around My Bedside" is a traditional religious song built on one repeated plea, with each verse asking for the Lord's company at another hard moment: in sickness, in prayer, in dying and in burial.[1] John Cohen, who recorded the singer and banjo player Roscoe Holcomb performing it with guitar, wrote in his album notes that the only other places he had heard it were Holiness church services in the mountains, along with a related version sung by Black singers in South Carolina in 1947.[1] Cohen heard in its "repetitive chant" a way for the singer to linger over moments of frailty and fear in the sight of God.[1]
Frederic, Lord Leighton, A Deathbed Scene, pen and ink, brush and wash and gouache, ca. 1849. A mother and child beside a sickbed, drawn by Frederic Leighton, shown for the sickness and dying of the song's verses; the drawing has no connection to the song.
Holcomb's performance closes the second side of Close to Home (Folkways FA 2374, 1975), an album that Cohen recorded, edited and annotated.[1] The song also appears as the final track of Smithsonian Folkways' 1998 album The High Lonesome Sound, which gathers recordings of the Kentucky mountain singer made in 1961, 1964 and 1974 and first issued on three Folkways LPs.[2] Among dulcimer players, Don Pedi sets it in DGD tuning in Old-Time Sacred Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a 60-page book he published himself, offered on DulcimerDownloads as a licensed download that also breaks the songs out into individual PDFs and MP3 audio files.[3]
Sources
- Smithsonian Folkways: "Roscoe Holcomb, Close to Home (FA 2374), liner notes by John Cohen".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "The High Lonesome Sound, Roscoe Holcomb".
- Don Pedi: "Old-Time Sacred Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Frederic, Lord Leighton, A Deathbed Scene, pen and ink, brush and wash and gouache, ca. 1849. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.