No. 117 Be Gone Unbelief, Ol 187
Pentatonic, mode 2 (I — 3 IV V — 7)
Be gone unbelief, my Savior is near,
And for my relief will surely appear;
By prayer let me wrestle and He will perform;
With Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm.
Tho’ dark be my way, since He is my guide,
’Tis mine to obey, ’Tis His to provide;
Tho’ cisterns be broken, and creatures all fail,
The word He has spoken will surely prevail.
His life in time past forbids me to think
He’ll leave me at last, in trouble to sink;
Each sweet Ebenezer, I have in review,
Confirms His good pleasure to bring me quite thro’.
Since all that I meet shall work for my good;
The bitter, the sweet; the medicine, food;
Tho’ painful at present ’twill cease before long,
And then, O how pleasant the conqueror’s song!
William Hauser, compiler of the Olive Leaf tells that this “air [was] learned of Reverend Samuel Anthony, of Georgia, in 1841.” The tune of a Virginia version of the ‘Brown Girl’ (Sharp, i., 303) is very close to this in note-trend and character. Also ‘Pretty Saro’, Sharp, ii., 10-12; ‘Cuckoo’, Sharp, ii., 180; ‘Green Bushes’, Sharp, ii., 155; ‘Farewell, Dear Rosanna’, Sharp, ii., 243 and 244, are the same type. Negro adoptions of the tune are Marsh, pp. 144 and 173, and SS, p. 33. A variant in this collection is ‘Rest in Heaven’. For its relationship to the ‘I Will Arise’ tune family, see the song with that title in this collection. The errors in Hauser’s notation of the tune (second, fourth, sixth measures etc.) have been left uncorrected.