The melody which Johann Sebastian Bach, the great adapter of folk-tunes, made a peasant sing in his Cantata ‘Mer hahn en neue Oberkeet’ spread to England and became there the setting of a number of popular texts in the first half of the eighteenth century. One of these songs, dating from 1772, was ‘Farewell, Ye Green Fields and Sweet Groves’ which gave birth, probably also in England, to the religious song ‘Green Fields’, found in every old southern fasola book. Its opening lines are
How tedious and tasteless the hours
When Jesus no longer I see.
Sweet prospects, sweet birds and sweet flowers
Have all lost their sweetness to me.
With ‘Saw Ye my True Love’ as a model, the task of making the religious text ‘Saw Ye My Savior,’ sung to the same tune, was a grateful one.
The happy inebriate who is his own hero in ‘Way Up On Clinch Mountain’ is reformed and regretful in ‘John Adkins’ Farewell’ where he gives warning to other alcoholics in the same melodic strain.
From the above examples it would seem that the secular text contained often some hint which led the religious adapter in making his new poetic lines; and that the secular tune usually followed as a matter of course.
The comparison of tunes shed no actually new light on the age of the tunes. But it made clear the fact that the folk’s stock of melodies is assembled from divers times. The tunes of two songs in this collection, ‘[New Orleans]’, and ‘[Hark my Soul]’, have tonal trends strikingly similar to that of melodies found in the eleventh and early thirteenth centuries respectively. From the early seventeenth century we find ‘[Mourner’s Lamentation]’ which was in those earlier times ‘Wae is Me for Prince Charley’, a Jacobite song about Charles II of England. ‘[Beggar]’ is a remake of ‘A-Begging We Will Go’ which has been traced back to 1611. ‘Captain Kidd’ or ‘Kidd’, as it is disguised in the fasola books, dates from the first part of the eighteenth century. It is significant that most of the tunes mentioned in the above paragraphs are comparatively modern in their musical aspects. This fact leads to the suspicion that the really old-sounding tunes, those in the antique modes—dorian, phrygian, and the like, especially in their gapped forms—originated in still earlier times. Here is an inviting field for the student of comparative folk-melodism.