No. 40 Poor Wayfaring Stranger, Gos 714
Pentatonic, mode 2 minorized (I — 3 IV V — VII)
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
While trav’ling through this world of woe,
Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger
In that bright world to which I go.
I’m going there to see my father,
I’m going there no more to roam;
I’m only going over Jordan,
I’m only going over home.
I know dark clouds will gather round me,
I know my way is rough and steep;
Yet beauteous fields lie just before me
Where God’s redeem’d their vigils keep.
I’m going there to see my mother,
She said she’d meet me when I come;
I’m only going over Jordan,
I’m only going over home.
I’ll soon be freed from every trial,
My body sleep in the church-yard;
I’ll drop the cross of self-denial
And enter on my great reward.
I’m going there to see my class-mates,
Who’ve gone before me one by one;
I’m only going over Jordan,
I’m only going over home.
I want to wear a crown of glory,
When I get home on that good land;
I want to shout salvation’s story,
In concert with the blood-wash’d band;
I’m going there to see my Savior,
To sing his praise forever more;
I’m only going over Jordan,
I’m only going over home.
This is a comparatively recent recording (around the beginning of the present century) of an extremely widely sung folk-tune. It appears in Good Old Songs as a bare melody, no harmonic parts. I suggest, as an explanation of the d-flat in the fifth measure from the end, the intrusion of dorian influence. The earliest known recording among the fasola folk was in the first edition of the Sacred Harp, 1844. The negro adoptions and adaptations are reviewed WS 251ff.
The tune is quite evidently borrowed from secular environment. I list here a number of secular songs whose tunes are variously related: ‘Barbara Allen’, Sharp, i., 194 and 195; ‘In Old Virginny’, Sharp, ii., 232-234; ‘Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies’, Sharp, ii., 128-136; ‘Katie Morey’, Sharp, ii., 120; ‘Dear Companion’, Sharp, ii., 109; ‘George Reilly’, Sharp, ii., 26; ‘Awake, Awake’, Sharp, i., 358-364, and Petrie, Nos. 1222 and 265.
A note on this song in the Social Harp says that the compiler, John G. McCurry, Hartwell, Georgia, “when eight years old, learned the air of this tune from Mrs. Catherine Penn.” That was therefore in the year 1829.
Text passages in the secular ballads which remind of those in the fasola song are seen in ‘In Old Virginny’, where we read:
I am a man of constant sorrow,
I have seen troubles all my days.
I’ll bid farewell to old Virginia,
The place where I was partly raised.
We see also in ‘Awake, Awake’, how the poor wayfaring stranger appears as “your true love” who “is going away.”