I wish to express here my deep gratitude to Mr. Hilton Rufty for his generous help in verifying the musical aspects of this collection and in helping me solve many a knotty problem in interpreting the tunes which I have transcribed from the old singing-school books. Mr. John Powell has earned my sincere thanks for reading critically the entire manuscript, calling my attention to a number of inaccuracies, and to many secular melodies related to those in this volume.
The present collection would have been far less comprehensive without the use of a number of unique source books placed at my disposal by friends. I wish therefore to acknowledge gratefully the co-operation of Mr. Will H. Ruebush for providing me with The Olive Leaf and The Social Harp; Mrs. Annabel Morris Buchanan for The Union Harmony (Hendrickson); Mr. E. S. Lorenz for The Revivalist and Songs of Grace; Mr. John Lair for the Scots Musical Museum; The Lawson McGhee Library (Knoxville, Tennessee) for The Church Harmony and The Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony; Mr. W. E. Bird for The Southern and Western Pocket Harmonist; and Miss Lucille Wilkin for The Western Harmony. The University of North Carolina Press has kindly allowed me to reproduce several songs from White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. For this I wish to express my sincere thanks.
I wish also to thank those who have furnished me with songs from oral tradition. Among such helpful contributors are Professor Donald Davidson, Mr. Don West, Mr. Samuel E. Asbury, Mr. Francis Arthur Robinson, and Miss Will Allen Dromgoole. My gratitude is hereby expressed also to Dr. Carleton Sprague Smith, Chief of the Music Division of the New York Public Library, and to Dr. Oliver Strunk, Chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress for their helpfulness.
My daughter, Frances Helen Parker, and my sisters, Carol Jackson Ransom and Genevieve Jackson Beckwith, have given me invaluable help in preparing this book for the printer and in correcting the proofs. For this I am deeply and lastingly grateful to them.
George Pullen Jackson Vanderbilt University
Nashville, Tennessee, April 10, 1937
Opened, The Original Sacred Harp, 1911 edition measures twenty inches across. On the left hand page is a “fuguing” song composed in Alabama in 1908 in the eighteenth-century New England manner. ‘Jester’ on the right hand page is a typical camp-meeting spiritual song.
Fifty-one Religious Ballads
