No. 99 Mississippi, Skh 34
Heptatonic aeolian, mode A + b (I II 3 IV V 6 7)
When Gabriel’s awful trump shall sound,
And rend the rocks, convulse the ground
And give to time her utmost bound,
Ye dead arise to judgment.
See lightnings flash and thunders roll;
See earth wrapt up like parchment scroll,
Comets blaze, sinners raise,
Dread amaze, horrors seize
The guilty sons of Adam’s race,
Unsav’d from sin by Jesus.
The Christian, fill’d with rapturous joy,
Midst flaming worlds he mounts on high,
To meet his Savior in the sky
And see the face of Jesus.
The soul and body reunite,
And fill with glory infinite.
Blessed day, Christians say,
Will you pray that we may
All join that happy company
To praise the name of Jesus.
The compiler of the Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony attributed the song to “Bradshaw”. I find distinct ancestral traces of its tune in ‘Princess Royal’ given in a number of traditional forms as a morris dance tune in Sharp, The Morris Dance Book. Assuming these to be the oldest forms of the tune, the next younger form seems to have been what was called in Walsh’s Compleat Dancing Master (ca. 1730), “The Princess Royal, the new way”. In 1796 Shield adapted the air to the words of ‘The Saucy Arethusa’ in the ballad opera The Lock and Key. It may be found entitled ‘The Arethusa’ in The English Musical Repository, p. 32. At about the same time—around the end of the eighteenth century—the tune was used also for ‘Bold Nelson’s Praise’ a version of which was recently recorded by Sharp, One Hundred English Folk-Songs, No. 88. The as yet unidentified “Bradshaw” seems to have taken one of these late-eighteenth-century tunes—probably ‘Arethusa’—as his model when he made the ‘Mississippi’ song as it appeared in the Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony in 1820.