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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2023
from George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1943)
This unusually elaborate transcription comparing two spirituals is similar to those in OSC, but had a more purely analytic intent. It was originally included as a foldout insert at the end of Pullen Jackson's White and Negro Spirituals (published just a few years after OSC; see Tick, 279), and is currently out of print. Jackson explains and introduces this transcription in his book:
In Jacksonville I baited the congregation. I asked them to sing for me “Amazing Grace.” I had heard white Primitive Baptists sing it at Bildad Church in DeKalb Country, Tennessee, and I knew the song to be a favorite all over the rural Southeast… . This would be something to go by, I assured myself. I told Elder Graham I was going to try and sing along.
“That's fine,” he agreed, “but I reckon you won't be able to sing it like we do.”
And he was right. I started out bravely. I had to hold back. I had to hold long to one note-syllable until they caught up. I “twisted the tune” in my best country manner (which is not very good). They twisted it as I couldn’t. But all along I could see that they were singing the old familiar “Amazing Grace” tune as a surge song. I couldn't take down notes. I couldn't ask the congregation to repeat it, even once. So this song got away, too.
The song-catching task which stumped me has been performed without difficulty by the recording machine. Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge of the Archive of American Folk Song in the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and his staff have made many recordings of the elusive surge songs and have thus bound them to the analyst's operating table. The song “Amazing Grace” on the sheet inserted at the end of this book, there is transcribed from one of the Archive disks [No. 2684A1, as sung by Jesse Allison and a group of Primitive Baptists in Livingston, Alabama; collected by John A. and Ruby T. Lomax in May, 1939]. It is the text which I had heard in Jacksonville associated with another tune. But what tune was it?
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