We'll Camp A Little While In The Wilderness: A Song History

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The Traditional Ballad Index files "Camp a Little While in the Wilderness" as a spiritual of unknown authorship, found in the Appalachians.[1] It is built as a "zipper" song: the verses keep one frame and swap in a new group each time, fathers first and then mothers and children, while the refrain turns on being prepared and on going home.[1] The index's earliest dated example is a 1980 recording by Cas Wallin, and the sources consulted here do not trace the song to an earlier printing or a named writer.[1]

Engraving of men resting beside a bark lean-to and canoe in a mountain forest clearing

Winslow Homer, Camping Out in Adirondacks, from Harper's Weekly, wood engraving, 1874. Campers at a lean-to in the Adirondack wilderness, engraved after Winslow Homer in 1874, shown for the song's title; the engraving has no connection to the song.

Wallin (1903–1992) was a ballad singer from Madison County, North Carolina, from a family that sang for folklorists across several generations, and he belonged for a long time to Union Valley Missionary Baptist Church, where he was a song leader.[2] The collector Mike Yates recorded him during his Appalachian fieldwork of 1979–1983, and Wallin's "We'll Camp a Little While in the Wilderness," indexed as Roud 7699, appeared on the Home-Made Music LP Appalachia – The Old Traditions, Volume 2 in 1983.[3] Wallin singing the song came out again in 2002 on Far in the Mountains, Volume 3 from Musical Traditions Records, in a group of his performances that also includes the ballad "Lord Daniel."[3]

Aubrey Atwater does not tab this one in Song By Song, Vol. I, her self-published 132-page collection for dulcimer, banjo, whistle, guitar and voice; it sits instead among the closing songs printed with words and chord symbols for any instrument.[4]

Our book that contains the song "We'll Camp A Little While In The Wilderness"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Camp a Little While in the Wilderness".
  2. Blue Ridge National Heritage Area: "Cas Wallin".
  3. Mainly Norfolk: "Far in the Mountains".
  4. Aubrey Atwater: "Song By Song, Vol. I".
  5. Image: Winslow Homer, Camping Out in Adirondacks, from Harper's Weekly, wood engraving, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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