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Blow Your Trumpet Gabriel
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: 1867; Negro Spirituals by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867
RECORDING INFO: Blow Your Trumpet Gabriel
Allen, William Francis, et.al (eds.) / Slave Songs of the United States, Dover, Sof (1995/1867), # 4 [1860s]
OTHER NAMES: “Blow Your Trumpet Gabriel,”
SOURCES: from 1909 Howard W. Odum, "Religious Folk-Songs of the Southern Negroes" (American Journal of Psychology and Education, vol. iii, p. 356).
NOTES: “Blow Your Trumpet Gabriel” is found in Negro Spirituals by Thomas Wentworth Higginson from the Atlantic Monthly, June 1867 and William Francis Allen, et.al (eds.) 1867 book, Slave Songs of the United States.
Negro Spirituals by 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.
Often in the starlit evening I have returned from some lonely ride by the swift river, or on the plover-haunted barrens, and, entering the camp, have silently approached some glimmering Ore, round which the dusky figures moved in the rhythmical barbaric dance the negroes call a "shout," chanting, often harshly, but always in the most perfect time, some monotonous refrain. Writing down in the darkness, as I best could-perhaps with my hand in the safe covert of my pocket,-the words of the song, I have afterwards carried it to my tent, like some captured bird or insect, and then, after examination, put it by. Or, summoning one of the men at some period of leisure,- Corporal Robert Sutton, for instance, whose iron memory held all the details of a song as if it were a ford or a forest,-I have completed the new specimen by supplying the absent parts. The music I could only retain by ear, and though the more common strains were repeated often enough to fix their impression, there were others that occurred only once or twice.
The words will be here given, as nearly as possible, in the original dialect; and if the spelling seems sometimes inconsistent, or the misspelling insufficient, it is because I could get no nearer. I wished to avoid what seems to me the only error of Lowell's "Biglow Papers" in respect to dialect,- the occasional use of an extreme misspelling, which merely confuses the eye, without taking us any closer to the peculiarity of sound.
The next was one of those which I had heard in boyish days, brought North from Charleston. But the chorus alone was identical; the words were mainly different, and those here given are quaint enough.
XXV. BLOW YOUR TRUMPET, GABRIEL
O, blow your trumpet, Gabriel,
Blow your trumpet louder ;
And I want dat trumpet to blow me home
To my new Jerusalem.
De prettiest ting dat ever I done
Was to serve de Lord when I was young.
So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, &c.
O, Satan is a liar, and he conjure too,
And if you don't mind, he 'll conjure you.
So blow your trumpet, Gabriel, &c.
O, I was lost in de wilderness,
King Jesus hand me de candle down.
So blow your trumpet, Gabriel," &c.
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