he is not only following a practice of the early spiritual song makers and singers—his horse-shoe song itself is a parody of a spiritual in this collection—but he is singing in the infinitely older manner of his race. He is singing an organically constructed tune and refusing to let words interfere with it, a tendency which may be observed from ‘Sumer is icumen in’ to the nineteenth century songs of sailors and to other work-songs and children’s songs, like that of ‘The Big Bad Wolf’, today.
The text simplification in religious folk-songs began modestly. The variety of spiritual song which is closest to the folk-hymn is that in which each short stanza of text (four short lines usually) is followed by a chorus of the same length, as for example:
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye,
To Canaan’s fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.
Chorus
I’m bound for the promised land,
I’m bound for the promised land;
O who will come and go with me?