No. 214 That Lonesome Valley, Author’s Recording
Pentatonic, mode 3 (I II III — V VI —)
You got to go that lonesome valley,
You got to go there by yourself.
There’s no one can go there for you;
You got to go there,
you got to go there by yourself.
Recorded by the author, February 11, 1933, from the singing of Don West of the Highlander Folk School, Monteagle, Tennessee. Mr. West told me that the two subsequent stanzas began, “You got to lie in that lonesome graveyard” and “Some folks say that John was a Baptist.” After each verse the tune is repeated to the words of the first stanza.
The source of this spiritual song is very likely ‘In Seaport Town’, see Sharp, i., 310, in which there is the recurring phrase:
Till at last they came to a lonesome valley, and where considerable melodic similarity is to be found. Further traces of this typical folk-tune are in ‘Young Beichan’, Sharp, i., 79; ‘My Mother Bid Me’, Sharp, ii., 94, tune D; ‘Opossum’, Sharp, ii., 353; ‘Drivin’ Steel’, Sandburg, p. 150; the negro song ‘You Got to Cross it for Yourself’, Sandburg, p. 486; and ‘That Lonesome Valley’, Grissom, p. 2.
In The Carolina Low-Country, pp. 284ff., there are two negro spirituals which lean heavily on ‘That Lonesome Valley’. The “lonesome valley” symbolized, among both negroes and whites, also the mourning period which was a necessary forerunner of religious conversion.