Welcome Table: A Song History
"Welcome Table" is a spiritual that the Traditional Ballad Index files as a religious song built from floating verses, known under a string of titles that includes "I'm Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table," "Some of These Days" and "God's Going to Set This World on Fire."[1] The index suggests it began in African American tradition before spreading to white singers, and it lumps the song's widely varying versions together as one.[1] The welcome-table image itself predates any recording: in 1874 it appears as one verse of "Oh, Den My Little Soul's Gwine to Shine," the first of the fifty cabin and plantation songs Thomas P. Fenner arranged for Hampton and Its Students, headed by a note that a boy sold down South sang it as he parted from his mother.[2] The Ballad Index lists a separate song, "My Little Soul's Going to Shine," as sharing floating verses with "Welcome Table."[1]
Thomas Waterman Wood, Reading the Scriptures, watercolor, gouache and graphite, 1874. An elderly man reading the Bible, painted in 1874, the year the welcome-table verse appeared in Hampton and Its Students; the painting has no connection to the song.
The earliest date the Ballad Index gives for "Welcome Table" proper is a 1922 recording.[1] That October a male quartet from the Florida Normal and Industrial Institute sang "The Welcome Table," unaccompanied, for OKeh in New York.[3] The Carter Family recorded it as "River of Jordan" in Camden, New Jersey, on May 10, 1928, with A. P. Carter credited as arranger.[4][1] The Ballad Index also files under this song two records about walking the streets of glory, by the West Virginia Snake Hunters (recorded 1927) and the West Virginia Night Owls (1928).[1]
The spiritual found new purpose in the 1960 Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins: the notes to the Folkways album The Nashville Sit-In Story name it among three old spirituals that served the Nashville movement as theme songs, and the album's contents include "I'm Going to Sit at the Welcome Table."[5] The notes to a 1961 Folkways album of Freedom Rider and sit-in songs count it among the spirituals the Nashville Quartet and fellow students sang at mass meetings and demonstrations, and the Ballad Index lists "I'm Gonna Sit at the Freedom Table," a civil rights movement song, as sharing its tune.[6][1] Hymnary.org now finds the WELCOME TABLE tune in thirteen hymnals, among them Yes, Lord! (1982), Glory to God (2013) and Voices Together (2020).[7] Bing Futch arranges "Welcome Table" in DAD tuning in Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 5 - Gospel), a 46-page collection of spiritual music for the dulcimer that comes with MP3 recordings of each song.[8]
Sources
- The Traditional Ballad Index: "Welcome Table".
- Internet Archive: "Hampton and Its Students, with Fifty Cabin and Plantation Songs Arranged by Thomas P. Fenner (1874)".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "OKeh matrix S-70906. The welcome table / Florida Normal and Industrial Institute Quartette".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-45027. River of Jordan / Carter Family".
- Smithsonian Folkways: "The Nashville Sit-In Story" (liner notes).
- Smithsonian Folkways: "We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-Ins" (liner notes).
- Hymnary.org: "WELCOME TABLE".
- Bing Futch: "Mountain Dulcimer In The Band (Book 5 - Gospel)".
- Image: Thomas Waterman Wood, Reading the Scriptures, watercolor, gouache and graphite, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.