All you that would dwell with me there.”
The text is attributed, by the 1911 editor of the Sacred Harp, to B. F. White, original compiler of that book. He wrote it “on the lone prairie in Texas”, while standing “at the grave of a friend who once lived in Georgia”. In Folksongs of Mississippi Hudson gives a variant text from oral tradition and tells of a local legend as to its source which agrees in the main with that given in the Sacred Harp which book, I suspect, was the source of the Mississippi legend.
The tune, variously claimed in the fasola books, is identical with the ‘Braes o’ Balquhidder’. See Gilchrist, JFSS, viii., 77. Other derivatives of the same tune are ‘[Sinner’s Invitation]’, ‘[Florence]’, and ‘[Orphan Girl]’ in this collection. In The Musical Quarterly, xxii., No. 2, I have shown the relationship between this tune and Stephen Foster’s ‘Linda Has Departed’.
No. 19
[ORPHAN GIRL], CSH 506
Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)
“No home, no home”, plead a little girl,
At the door of a princely hall,
As she trembling stood on the polish’d step,
And lean’d on the marble wall.