Can unfold
The mountain Calvary,
Where Christ our Lord did die.
Hark, hear the Savior cry,
Mountains quake, heavens shake,
Christ, call’d to heaven’s host,
Left their coast.
The tune is ascribed to Nicholson. The oldest American recording known to me is in the four-shape-note manuscript song collection made by Catherine Alderice in or near Emmittsburg, Md., 1800-1830, p. 37. Miss Gilchrist calls attention to the secular ‘Captain Kidd’ ballad, of which the above is a parody, as it appeared, twenty-five verses long, in Our Familiar Songs and Who Made Them, published in America, 1889. She describes it as “a sort of dying speech and testament probably dating from about 1701 in which year Kidd and nine of his associates were hanged in Execution Dock.... There were many other eighteenth century songs, built on this peculiar stanzaic plan, celebrating other notorious characters, ‘Admiral Benbow,’ ‘Jack (or Sam) Hall.’” Other American spiritual songs in this collection having the same stanzaic form are ‘[Wondrous Love]’ and ‘[Remember Sinful Youth]’.
No. 143
[JERUSALEM], SOH (1835) 60
Heptatonic aeolian, mode 2 A + b (I II 3 IV V 6 VII).