Oh may my kind neighbors your guardians prove,
And heaven, kind heaven, protect you above.
My soul to His pleasure I humbly submit,
And with my last burthen fall down at His feet;
To plead for His mercy that flows from above,
That pardons poor drunkards, and crowns them above.
John G. McCurry, compiler of the Social Harp, claims this song and dates it 1851. The tune is identical with that of ‘When Boys Go A-Courting’, Sharp, ii., 206. The “drunkard” theme may have been the textual source of ‘Way Up On Clinch Mountain’, where, to the same tune, the singer glories in his excesses including that of whiskey drinking. See Sandburg, 307. Miss Scarbrough has a negro adoption of the same tune in ‘Noble Skewball’; see On the Trail of the Negro Folk-Song, 63. An English folk-song ‘Sweet England’ has a variant tune. See English Folk-Songs for Schools, 46. For an Irish variant see Petrie, No. 1172. A Scotch variant is ‘My Ain Fireside’, Lyric Gems of Scotland, 186, which in turn borrowed its tune from ‘Todlen Hame’.
No. 12
[REDEMPTION (C)], KHN 185
Heptatonic ionian, mode 3 A + b (I II III IV V VI VII)
