Aunt Rhody- Version 1 

Traditional song and breakdown, originally from old France.
 
ARTIST: Bluegrass Messengers- Standard lyrics

Listen: Go Tell Aunt Nancy- Almeida Riddle

Listen: Old Gray Goose- Carolina Tar Heels

SHEET MUSIC: Read PDF Arranged and transcribed R. Matteson- Appears in Matteson's "Acoustic Music Source Book"


CATEGORY: Fiddle and Instrumental Tunes. DATE: Part of an opera in 1750; Recorded in US in 1925.

RECORDING INFO: American Ballads and Folk Songs, MacMillan, Bk (1934), p.305 (Old Grey Goose); Carolina Tar Heels. Folk Music in America, Vol.13, Songs of Childhood, Library of Congress LBC-13, LP (1978), cut#A.04 (Old Grey Goose); Carolina Tar Heels. Carolina Tar Heels, Old Homestead OHCS 113, LP (1978), cut# 6 (Old Grey Goose); Highwaymen. Homecoming, United Artists UAL 3348, LP (196?), cut#A.05; Ives, Burl. Burl Ives Sings for Fun, Decca DL 8248, LP (195?), cut#B.04 (Aunt Rhody/ie); MacArthur, Margaret. How to Play the MacArthur Harp, Front Hall FHRBP 1005, Cas (1986), cut#p.13; Marais and Miranda. Songs of Many Lands, Decca DL 5106, LP (195?), cut#B.03; Reagon, Bernice (Johnson). Folk Songs: the South, Folkways FA 2457, LP, cut#A.03 (Aunt Rhody/ie); Riddle, Almeda. Sounds of the South, Atlantic 7-82496-2, CD( (1993), cut#4.08 (Go Tell Aunt Nancy); Riddle, Almeda. Singer and Her Songs. Almeda Riddle's Book of Songs, Louisiana State, Bk (1970), p118 (Go Tell Aunt Nancy); Ritchie, Jean and Edna. Ritchie Family of Kentucky, Folkways FA 2316, LP (1959), cut#B.03c; Ritchie, Jean. Best of Jean Ritchie, Prestige International 13003, LP (196?), cut# 20; Ritchie, Jean. Folk Go-Go, Verve/Folkways FV 9011, LP (197?), cut# 11; Ritchie, Jean. Most Dulcimer, Greenhays GR 714, LP (1984), cut# 13 (Aunt Rhody/ie); Ritchie, Jean. Saturday Night and Sunday Too, Riverside RLP 12-620, LP (1956), cut#B.10a; Sansone, Maggie. Dulcimer Player News, Dulcimer Player News DPN, Ser (1973-), 8/2, p3; Stracke, Win. Folk Songs for the Young, Golden Records, LP (1962), cut#B.02 (Aunt Rhody/ie); Weavers. Weavers' Song Book, Harper & Row, Sof (1960), p 99 (Aunt Rhody/ie) ; Weavers. The Weavers at Home, Vanguard VRS 9024, LP (195?), cut#A.05 (Aunt Rhody/ie); Pickard Family, "The Old Gray Goose is Dead". Pete Seeger, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" OTHER NAMES: The Old Gray Goose is Dead; Gray Goose (Not to be confused with the minstrel song- "Gray Goose" which is part of the "My Wife Died on A Saturday Night" family of songs); Go Tell Aunt Rhody/Rhodie; Go Tell Aunt Nancy; Related to: Chiny/Chiney/China Doll; Down Came an Angel

SOURCES: Herren, Ruth Burton. Sweet Bunch of Daisies, Colonial Press, Bk (1991), p115 (Old Grey Goose); Randolph 270, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody"; Lomax-FSUSA 3, "Go Tell Aunt Nancy" Lomax-ABFS, pp. 305-306, "The Old Gray Goose"; Arnett, p. 39, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody"; Chase, pp. 176-177, "The Old Gray Goose is Dead." Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc. PSeeger-AFB, p. 45, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody"; Pankake-PHCFSB, p. 275, "Go Tell Aunt Rhody"; Silber-FSWB, p. 404, "Aunt Rhody".

NOTES: "Old Gray Goose" (Old Gray Goose II) is a version of "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" not the minstrel song also known as "My Wife Died On A Saturday Night". "Old Gray Goose" (Old Gray Goose II) is sung and also played as fiddle tune and instrumental solo.

Kuntz: "Randolph quotes Chase to the effect that this tune was used in an opera by Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1750. The situation is rather more complex than this would imply. The most recent, and most significant, work on this subject is Murl Sickbert, Jr.'s "Go Tell Aunt Rhody She's Rousseau's Dream" (published 2000). Norm Cohen reports the following: "In 1752, Rousseau composed 'Le Devin du village,' a pastoral opera bouffe.... [The Aunt Rhody tune appears] as a gavotte in the pantomime no. 8 (divertissement or ballet). It is danced by 'la villageoise,' a shepherdess or country girl, to music without words." Sickbert observes that the Rousseau composition is more elaborate than the folk tune, with "two addditional parts or reprises, not one as Lomax gives it." The tune came to be called "Rousseau's Dream," apparently by confusion: Another Rousseau score allegedly came to him while he was suffering from delerium. The title, according to Percy A. Scholes in The Oxford Companion to Music, was given by J. B. Cramer." (Kuntz, Fiddler's Companion, http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc).

Notes by John Bealle:  Under the title "Old Gray Goose," "Go Tell Aunt Rhody," or "Go Tell" any of several other aunts, this song was common and widely dispersed in collections by twentieth-century folklore collectors. The "Aunt Rhody" text does not appear in British collections. Krehbiel considered the song "widely distributed" among African Americans.

The tune is thought by some to have been derived from an air composed for a 1752 opera by the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was extracted as a song and printed in many settings, including shape note tunebooks that permeated areas of the U.S. where "Aunt Rhody" later appeared. It is believed that this is the source for the "Aunt Rhody" tune.

There is no known source for the text, but some speculate that "Go Tell Aunt Nancy" variants are connected to the Anansi trickster cycle of West Africa and the Caribbean and that other Aunts are related to this source. There is still disagreement surrounding both conclusions. Because "Aunt Rhody" has been widely collected and because the connection with Rousseau is so unusual, this matter is still of great interest to some scholars. I have reviewed the various arguments below in detail, but this may well be beyond the interests of many readers.

The tune has received a great deal of attention due to accounts of its unusual route into American folksong, summarized in an article by musicologist Murl Sickbert (1999). It first appeared as an air in an opera by the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, Le devin du village, first performed in 1752, in a section titled "Pantomime," with no text. In the early nineteenth century the tune was extracted from the opera and printed in song adaptations and pianoforte variations. In 1812 it appeared under the title "Rousseau's Dream," with English words, "Now, while eve's soft shadows bleeding," written by William Ball. Spurious stories circulated that the air had appeared to Rousseau in a dream. Le Devin was performed in New York as early as 1790, and by the early nineteenth century the air "Rousseau's Dream" had arrived in the U.S. Over the years the song achieved so compelling a distribution in this form that "Rousseau's Dream" had its own entry in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians beginning in 1878, though without any mention of "Aunt Rhody" in this or any revisions (to 1954) of the article (Sickbert 1999:137n26).

The implication of all of this is the suggestion that the simple air was adapted from printed sources and performances for the "Aunt Rhody" text that circulated in folksong. This case is strengthened considerably by the appearance of the tune in singing tunebooks, which, unlike the parlor and concert sources, circulated mostly in rural areas where "Aunt Rhody" variants later appeared, seemingly without explanation. The first tunebook printing of the song was in the Boston Handel and Haydn Society collection of 1825, with the title "Greenfield" and tune attribution "Rosseau." The appearance of the tune as "Sweet Affliction" in The Sacred Harp in 1844 was, as Sickbert so aptly notes, "the first instance of the melody appearing in this type of hymnal for the common folk of the United States" (146). The attribution appeared as "John J. Rosseau, 1752," with the "Rosseau" spelling as in the Handel and Haydn Collection—suggesting that Handel and Haydn was the source for "Sweet Affliction." Later examples proliferate in tunebooks and hymnals, and this would seem to establish with certainty that the "Rousseau's Dream" pedigree extended through books like The Sacred Harp into areas where "Aunt Rhody" was collected.

All of these circumstances predate the collection of "Aunt Rhody" variants (Sickbert's chronological table begins with the Campbell-Sharp collection of 1918), and this suggests to Sickbert and many others that Rousseau is the ancestor for the air. But "Aunt Rhody" was collected widely in the U.S., and early collectors, unaware of the Rousseau link, had other ideas about the traditional origin of the song. For example, George Lyman Kittredge (whose grandfather sang the song in New Hampshire) squabbled with Dorothy Scarborough (who collected African American variants in Texas) over whether the song tradition belonged to European or African Americans (Scarborough 1925:195).

The "Rousseau's Dream" pedigree presumes to negate this argument altogether. But there are some unresolved issues. There is no known source for the text, yet no one has accounted with any satisfaction how a tune dispersed in print could be so widely attached to a relatively stable oral text that never appeared in the printed sources. Sickbert's over-the-top (or facetious?) suggestion that the water imagery in "Rhody" was imported from "Sweet Affliction" ("floods of tribulation," "rolling billows," "gracious rain") can only fuel such skepticism (147n55). He cites George Pullen Jackson in asserting a crossover in the Rousseau-to-Rhody direction. But Jackson has been discredited for this reasoning: to say that printed sources preceded oral ones does not assure that the oral sources were not already there.

The sheer simplicity of the tune and the wide dispersal of "Aunt Rhody" variants is enough to suspect that traditional sources operated through or alongside Rousseau. One such argument, though speculative, attributed Italian influences:

I find however, on what is, I am afraid, good authority, that this air was not even pretended by Rousseau to be composed by him: that it was the melody to which the verses of Tasso and Ariosto were nightly sung by the gondoliers of Venice. When Rousseau paid his visit to that romantic town he heard this and introduced it in his Operetta; it is there called "Pantomime," no words being set to it. (Fraser 1893:45-46)

The Rousseau connection is further confounded by confusion as to what hymn tunes he influenced. The above writer reports that Toplady wrote "Rock of Ages" to this tune. And folklorist William McNeil (1985) reported that Arkansas folksinger Almeda Riddle derived her "Aunt Rhody" variant from "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing." These observations do not discredit the well-documented pedigree of the Rousseau air, of course, but merely suggest that other similar tunes may not be governed by it.

Such a claim is bolstered by a study of this tune in the context of tune-family research. This type of research is used, for example, in legal cases where familial relationships establish the basis for copyright litigation:

Tune-family research has included delineating processes of song transmission and musical borrowing, locating the geographical and/or temporal margins of a persistent melody, establishing the range of uses to which a single melody has been put, and exploring the diverse ways in which it can be elaborated. The study of similarity and its perceptual correlates has obvious value in the examination of music plagiarism claims. (Selfridge-Field 2006:1)

Selfridge-Field's tune-family analysis of the Rousseau-Rhody connection draws this conclusion:

This pair of "matches" is somewhat disputable. Rousseau’s piece has a melodic range of a perfect fourth but includes four different note durations (plus that of the grace note). "Aunt Rhody" spans a perfect fifth but includes only two durational values. To judge from studies of music perception, the difference of a third between the first notes of Bar 3 is so significant (because of its occurrence at the start of the second phrase) that these melodies should probably not be considered to belong to the same melodic family. (Selfridge-Field 2006:3)

Selfridge-Field's analysis must be taken with a substantial grain of salt, however. She presumes in advance that this is a case "in which a composed melody passes into common usage," and then uses that presumption to measure Rousseau's original against a single Rhody variant, one not clearly transcribed from performance. Most disturbing, the presence of "Sweet Affliction as an intermediary tune"—which does span a perfect fifth, omit the grace note, and incorporate the change in Bar 3—is neglected. Her evidence, then, would seem to prove that "Sweet Affliction" is related to Rhody but not to Rousseau, even though tunebook compilers credited it as a Rousseau composition. I doubt anyone would agree with that conclusion, particularly after Sickbert's fine account.

If "Aunt Rhody" is to be considered as a traditional (non-Rousseauan) melody, the most insistent assertion has been an African origin. Dorothy Scarborough's 1925 retort to Kittredge (1925:195) that she was "reluctant to surrender this favorite to the whites" was based on fieldwork and firsthand observation among Texas singers, and she may have taken into account factors such as the distribution of the song in Texas and the song histories given by performers. In a later collection, Arkansas singer Almeda Riddle sang "Go Tell Aunt Nancy" to the "Aunt Rhody" tune—a version she learned in her childhood that speaks to the alleged African American connections of the song. A key theme in Riddle's "Aunt Nancy" was that the goose was killed by a falling walnut. The gander and goslings mourn. When she is taken in and cooked, the family is stricken by misfortune—the fork breaks, grandma's teeth break, and the saw teeth break when she is butchered (Abrahams 1970a:117-120). Thus Riddle's trickster goose links the song, as folklorist Roger Abrahams observes, to the African American "Grey Goose" (such as the version sung by Leadbelly to a wholly different tune) where the goose exacts revenge upon her killers (178n47). And "Aunt Nancy" is the character "Anansi" from the West African story cycle, who appears in the Caribbean and parts of the U.S. with the "Aunt Nancy" name.

The suggested Anansi link can be easily assessed by determining whether any Rhody characteristics—the Gray Goose character, for example—exists in Anansi tradition, or if the song itself is sung in areas out of Rousseauan reach. The goose does not appear at all in Beckwith's Jamaican Anansi collection of 150 tales, and has not turned up in my cursory survey of other African and Caribbean materials. But there are some insistent claims in popular collections that a traditional Caribbean Gray Goose exists. Hobson and Hobson (1996) report a game whose text goes: 'Go tell Aunt Nancy; That poor Mother Goose is gone; She left nine little goslings; All along' (Hobson and Hobson 1996). Vinton reports, with a lamentable absence of documentation, a "Go tell Aunt Nancy" text that is used with a game "throughout the Caribbean as far south as Cartagena, Columbia, and in the Gulf Coast states of the U.S.A." (1970:96). In this version Aunt Nancy is the trickster-rescuer, in keeping with the usual Anansi role, who rescues the goose and goslings after they are taken by the fox. The implication of this is clear: evidence of any part of the "Aunt Rhody" melody or narrative outside of Rousseauan reach suggests a parallel tradition that should be the source for most if not all "Aunt Rhody" variants.

One further minor issue: Sickbert makes an astute point about the line, "the one that she's been savin'; to make a feather bed." The line is the foremost concern associated with the goose's death. It projects an atmosphere of pathos and suggests some kind of loss. But for someone long awaiting feathers for a bed, the goose's death should be a matter not of loss but of gain, of great celebration. Perhaps the plaintive Rhody melody is to blame for the apparently widespread misinterpretation. In any case, the song's pathos is more comprehensible when gander-gosling grief or even trickster revenge is included. Sickbert, of course, does not go so far as to suggest that these elements were eliminated in Anglo-American Rhody variants, where the inexplicable concern for material comfort has replaced the grief and revenge from the "Gray Goose" variants. This point is not overwrought: accounts of the "meaning" of Aunt Rhody often point to the extraordinary value during frontier times of goose feathers for homemade beds.

In sum, it seems there is a line to be drawn somewhere between Rousseau and Aunt Rhody. The "Sweet Affliction" family of tunebook entries belong to Rousseau. And while the Rousseauan air may have exerted influence on all the various Aunts, it seems clear that they were not entirely borne from it.

Aunt Rhody- Bluegrass Messengers lyrics
Read PDF Arranged and transcribed R. Matteson- Appears in Matteson's "Acoustic Music Source Book"
 

Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody that the old gray goose is dead.

The one she's been saving, the one she's been saving,
The one she's been saving to make a feather bed.

The old gander's weeping, the old gander's weeping,
The old gander's weeping, because his wife is dead.

The goslings are mourning, the goslings are mourning
The goslings are mourning because their mother's dead.

She died in the mill pond, she died in the mill pond
She died in the mill pond from standing on her head.

Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody,
Go tell Aunt Rhody that the old gray goose is dead.