Appendices (To Come)
Songbooks
Reference and Other Books
The Folklore
The Music
Other
Bibliography (To Come)
About This
Site
And the mysterious tune affected him like a charm.
It possessed and troubled him ceaselessly.
Frances Gaither, Follow the Drinking Gourd
Why a Drinking Gourd Website?
I first read Jeanette Winter's Follow the Drinking Gourd
picture book in the
summer of 2004. My family (which includes two elementary school
students) then heard the audiobook version. I shared the book with my
parents-in-law, both of them serious map collectors and strong supporters of
the University of Southern Maine. Educational outreach is one of the
chief missions of their
Osher
Map Library. They in turn passed the book along to the Library staff, who are always seeking ways to make geographic learning
appealing to elementary school students.
As the Library considered programming built around the song, I began
to feel responsible. I decided to learn more and, as an amateur
discographer, figured it would also take me about two weeks to prepare a
discography. I was sure that there would be 78s by the Fisk Jubilee
Singers or other early recording artists, along with printed versions in
old songbooks such as
Slave Songs of
the United States. I was stunned that the earliest recording was by
the Weavers in 1951 and that the earliest print account dated to 1928.
My curiosity piqued, I launched into an effort, still underway, to try
to understand the song and its cultural history.
I examined Lee Hays's papers at the
Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage,
did some additional primary research at the Boston Public Library,
imposed mightily on the capable reference staff at the local
Cary
Memorial Library (Lexington, MA), and generally contacted everyone I
thought might know something about the song. This site is the result.
About the Author
Joel Bresler is a technology and publishing executive with over 25
years experience at leading corporations and new ventures in general
management, business development and fundraising. Other interests
include discographical and historical research.
Contact Information
Joel Bresler
250 E. Emerson Rd.
Lexington, MA 02420
USA
joel.br@verizon.net
IN CASE OF VERIZON EMAIL PROBLEMS, PLEASE USE MY BACK-UP EMAIL:
joelbresler-at-gmail.com
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Please send me your email if you would like to be alerted to major
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In the News
New York Times, February 2, 2007
Research from this site was used in an Op-ed piece entitled
History's Tangled Threads by Fergus M. Bordewich on February 2,
2007. Please see
here for the
full article. An excerpt:
Popular songs associated with the underground rarely withstand
scrutiny, either. Recent research has revealed that the
inspirational ballad "Follow the Drinking Gourd" — perhaps the
single best-known "artifact" of the Underground Railroad — was first
published in 1928, and that much of the text and music as we know it
today was actually composed by Lee Hays of the Weavers in 1947. Nor
do its "directions" conform to any known underground route.
Tuscaloosa News, February 11, 2007
Editorial Director Ben Windham mentioned this site in a detailed
column February 11, 2007 in the Tuscaloosa News, Looking for the truth about the
Confederate era. An excerpt:
Bresler may take some flak himself, but I like his approach. Even
though his work points to the song as a post-Civil War creation, he
doesn't call anyone a fake or a con artist.
The myths die hard, he acknowledges. Yet, Bresler asks, who needs
myths? The real story of the song that he documents on his Web site
is fascinating enough.
Please see
here for the full article. My earlier correspondence with Windham is
detailed here.
Dome-L, February 21, 2007
In light of the research presented here, the Planetarium community is
re-evaluating its popular show, Follow the Drinking Gourd. A
letter from the coordinator of the Andrus Planetarium at the Hudson
River Museum to the Dome-L mailing list (for planetarium professionals)
kicked off the discussion with an anecdote about "a revolt of audience
members":
To: Dome-L@topica.com
Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007
From: "Marc Taylor" <xxx@hrm.org>
Subject: Questioning Follow the Drinking Gourd.
Many of us...show a program about the song "Follow the Drinking
Gourd," which purports to be a coded song about how slaves used the
stars to find their way North. Again, the truth behind the story
seems much sparser than it is often stated to be, but it gives us
the chance to talk about the solstices and equinoxes, constellations
versus asterisms, star names and lore from Africa, the North Star
and wayfinding.
However, this last weekend we had a patron lead a revolt of
audience members who protested that the show was "irresponsible" in
its presentation of the story. This comes as a controversy is
brewing about a memorial to Fredrick Douglass in Harlem which
includes quilt patterns which are supposed, also, to be coded
messages. So revisionism is in the air. After looking into things a
little more, I'm starting to agree that Follow the Drinking Gourd is
not what it appears to be...In any case, at the HRM we've decided to
re-evaluate the show. Wanted to know what all of you have been doing
related to this.
Marc Taylor
SearchEngineWatch.com, March 13, 2007
Eric Enge posted
an analysis of how this site is presented by the three major search
engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. Essentially, Yahoo and MSN are
quicker to showcase new material, while Google lags behind. You can see
more discussion on what this site demonstrates about search engines
here.
Underground Railroad Free Press, May, 2007
It seems only fair to print the pans along with the praise. Editor
Peter H. Michael dissed and dismissed this site, writing:
Joel Bresler posits a case that the song did not exist in
Underground Railroad times since he can not find written proof that
it did.
James Rucker, leading Underground Railroad musicologist,
counters, "In researching the Underground Railroad, we have to use
intuition. Most escapees were illiterate, and it's absurd to think a
secret organization would keep written records."
I replied, in a Letter to the Editor that went unpublished:
Thank you for mentioning my website,
www.followthedrinkinggourd.org in your May, 2007 issue. I know it
can be difficult to condense a lengthy website and three years of
research into one line, but I never said "that the song did not
exist in Underground Railroad times" just because I "can not find
written proof that it did." The Drinking Gourd mythology afoot today
– that the song as we know it was sung by a large number of escaping
slaves – is simply not true. I invite your readers to visit the site
and draw their own conclusions.
As for Mr. Rucker's comments, it will be hard to have a fruitful
discussion about the Drinking Gourd song, Quilt Code or other
Underground Railroad topics if intuition is allowed to trump
research. The Drinking Gourd song as performed and recorded today by
Mr. Rucker and most other artists could not possibly have been sung
by escaping slaves, since the lyrics and arrangement were first
written and published by Lee Hays in 1947.
Rucker's contention about the absurdity of researching the
Underground Railroad comes up repeatedly in the field. In his February
2, 2007 New York Times Op-Ed piece cited above, Fergus Bordewich
directly challenges the
premise that the operations of the Underground Railroad were so
secret that the truth is essentially unknowable. In fact, there is
abundant documentation of the underground’s activities to be found
in antebellum antislavery newspapers, narratives of escape written
by former slaves and the recollections of participants recorded
after the Civil War, when there was no longer danger of reprisal.
SearchEngineWatch.com, May 30, 2007
Eric Enge updated his analysis of this site in his By the Numbers
column,
here. Eric
focused on Google's performance ranking this site, some interesting
Google search bugs I unearthed, and how long it took MSN to drop stale
pages at other sites.
SEOmoz.org, June 15, 2007
I uploaded a detailed blog entry on Google search bugs uncovered
while researching and publishing this site. Read the posting and
responses
here.
2007 Yearbook for Traditional Music
This website was reviewed by Cheryl. A. Tobler. The reviewer
particularly liked the Appendices and how they might be used for
teaching purposes:
This website is an excellent example of the possibilities and
value of in-depth research of folksongs for teaching
purposes...quality research into a folksong's history can affect and
influence other subject areas, such as history, African-American
studies, music, English, folklore, and even astronomy.
She also rightly noted that I still need to add a bibliography and
better citations. (In the meantime, please contact me if you need any
such information not yet published on the site.) The review closed by
saying the website showed the
...importance of historical exploration into the sometimes murky
origins of popular folksongs, especially those that have been given
symbolic status.
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