A note on this song in the Social Harp says that the compiler, John G. McCurry, Hartwell, Georgia, “when eight years old, learned the air of this tune from Mrs. Catherine Penn.” That was therefore in the year 1829.
Text passages in the secular ballads which remind of those in the fasola song are seen in ‘In Old Virginny’, where we read:
I am a man of constant sorrow,
I have seen troubles all my days.
I’ll bid farewell to old Virginia,
The place where I was partly raised.
We see also in ‘Awake, Awake’, how the poor wayfaring stranger appears as “your true love” who “is going away.”
No. 41
[ZION’S SOLDIER], SWP 118
Heptatonic aeolian, mode 4 a + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7).
