No. 96 French Broad, Soh 265
Hexatonic, mode 2 A (I II 3 IV V — 7)
High o’er the hills the mountains rise,
Their summits tow’r toward the skies;
But far above them I must dwell,
Or sink beneath the flames of hell.
Although I walk the mountains high,
Ere long my body low must lie,
And in some lonesome place must rot,
And by the living be forgot.
There it must lie till that great day,
When Gabriel’s awful trump shall say,
“Arise, the judgment day is come,
When all must hear their final doom.”
Four more stanzas in the Southern Harmony. Found also GOS 218, CHH 208. William Walker, compiler of the Southern Harmony, appends the note: “This song was composed by the author in the fall of 1831, while traveling over the mountains, on French Broad River, in North Carolina and Tennessee”. Walker must have been referring simply to the words. He was melodizing, probably unconsciously, in beaten paths. For his tune is almost identical with the older ‘Kedron’ (this collection) which was attributed to “Dare”. Walker declares, in his later song book, Christian Harmony, 1866, p. 208, that he “learned the air of this tune from my mother when only five years old.” That would have been 1814. Both the Dare and the Walker tunes are closely related to the melody of ‘McAfee’s Confession’, Sharp, ii., 16, lower tune, a western North Carolina recording of 1918; and to the Old World song, ‘The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies O’, One Hundred English Folk-Songs, p. 13.