And hallelujahs sing.
The earliest appearance of the text is in Mercer’s Cluster, a collection of rurally used hymns (not tunes) by Jesse Mercer, benefactor of Mercer University, who lived in Powellton, Georgia, in the 1820’s. The editor of the Sacred Harp attributes the tune to M. C. H. Davis, a southern rural. The song is found also UH 27, HH 83, HOC 113, WP 36, SOC 76, SOH I and CHH 58. The tune is a member of the ‘Lord Lovel’ family mentioned in the introduction, [p. 14], and is closely related to ‘Mermaid’, Sharp, i., 291, and to ‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’, SMM No. 3, and its seventeenth-century country-dance form ‘The Bonny Bonny Broome’, Playford’s The English Dancing Master, p. 74. For a list of other members of the ‘Lord Lovel’ tune family see ‘[Dulcimer]’ in this collection.
No. 8
[LITTLE FAMILY], WS 195 ff.
Pentatonic, mode 1 (I II — IV V VI —)
There was a little fam’ly
That liv’d in Bethany,
Two sisters and a brother
Compos’d that family.
With shouting and with singing