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Baby Gone Home
Tradtional Old-Time, Spiritual;
ARTIST: from "Negro Spirituals" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867.
CATEGORY: Traditional and Public Domain Bluegrass Gospel;
DATE: 1800s; "Negro Spirituals" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867.
RECORDING INFO: Baby Gone Home
OTHER NAMES: “The Baby Gone Home,”
SOURCES: from "Negro Spirituals" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867.
NOTES: “The Baby Gone Home” is found in "Negro Spirituals" by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867.
Negro Spirituals- Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867:
THE war brought to some of us, besides its direct experiences, many a strange fulfilment of dreams of other days. For instance, the present writer has been a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones. It was a strange enjoyment, therefore, to be suddenly brought into the midst of a kindred world of unwritten songs, as simple and indigenous as the Border Minstrelsy, more uniformly plaintive, almost always more quaint, and often as essentially poetic.
This interest was rather increased by the fact that I had for many years heard of this class of songs under the name of "Negro Spirituals," and had even heard some of them sung by friends from South Carolina. I could now gather on their own soil these strange plants, which I had before seen as in museums alone. True, the individual songs rarely coincided; there was a line here, a chorus there,-just enough to fix the class, but this was unmistakable. It was not strange that they differed, for the range seemed almost endless, and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida seemed to have nothing but the generic character in common, until all were mingled in the united stock of camp-melodies.
Of "occasional hymns," properly so called, I noticed but one, a funeral hymn for an infant, which is sung plaintively over and over, without variety of words.
XX. THE BABY GONE HOME Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1867
De little baby gone home,
De little baby gone home,
De little baby gone along,
For to climb up Jacob's ladder.
And I wish I 'd been dar,
I wish I 'd been dar,
I wish I 'd been dar, my Lord,
For to climb up Jacob's ladder.
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