Year Of Jubilo: A Song History
"Year of Jubilo" is another name for "Kingdom Coming," a Civil War song with words and music by Henry Clay Work, written in 1862.[1] Work was the son of an abolitionist and shared his father's convictions; his home became a stop on the Underground Railroad.[2] It was a stage and blackface minstrel song, written in minstrel dialect, and tells of enslaved people on a plantation discovering their freedom after their owner flees ahead of the advancing Union army.[1] Its title borrows the biblical Year of Jubilee, when, every fifty years, slaves were to be set free.[1] The music publisher George F. Root later recalled being impressed by the manuscript's wit and good sense, and the song went on to be a staple of the Christy Minstrels for about a decade.[2] Work's later songs included "Marching Through Georgia" and "Grandfather's Clock."[1][2]
G. H. Houghton, Camp of 2nd Vermont Volunteers at Camp Griffin, Virginia, salted paper print, [1862]. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. A Union camp from the year the song was written; the photograph is not connected to the song.
The melody outlived its era in Southern string-band music. Sam and Kirk McGee had the tune from their father, Uncle John McGee, himself a fiddler with contest wins, and recorded it as "Old Master's Runaway" in New York in May 1927, with fiddler Mazy Todd, for Vocalion.[3] The Kessinger Brothers' 1930 Brunswick record "Sopping the Gravy" carries a more distant version of the tune.[4] Revival bands such as the Hollow Rock String Band and the Red Clay Ramblers later recorded it, and it appears in fiddle tune books such as Brody's Fiddler's Fakebook.[1]
Today mountain dulcimer players will find it among the seventy-five jam favorites in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam book for DAD tuning.[5]
Find books with Year Of Jubilo for sale →