Playlist

* Rise Up Shepherd and Follow Odetta 1:42

* Born in Bethlehem Blind Boys of Alabama, w. Mavis Staples 6:29

Music notes

Rise Up Shepherd and FollowI found a lot of information (as well as misinformation) about the origins of this song online. One thing is clear: It is an authentic spiritual – what we used to call a Negro spiritual. Most cite its earliest documentation as being in a short story written by Ruth McEnery Stuart titled Christmas-Gifts that appeared in the January-June 1891 issue Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.

The song appears in Ruth Craawford Seeger’s 1951 American Folk Songs for Christmas, and her attribution says that she collected it from Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, As Sung on the Plantations, a 1909 songbook compiled by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute’s Music Director Thomas P. Fenner. While Fenner might have gotten the song from that short story, but I think it more likely that he collected it directly from an African American source.

The song also appears in other plantation days songbooks published before 1920, but it is not clear to what extent they were copying songs from the same sources. I haven’t dug into it enough by looking for differences in the texts of the various sources to see if they all are derived from the quoted song in the Ruth McEnery Stuart short story.

Either way, we are left with the question of whether this is a song that dates back to the days of slavery, or whether it is a relatively new “jubilee spiritual”. Spirituals are inherently songs that were passed around orally and they would have been prone to rapidly evolving. Jubilee spiritual is the name given to songs that arose among freed ex-slaves either during the Civil War or shortly after it during the short-lived period of the 1865-1877 Reconstruction. That time period is after the ending of direct slavery but before the ex-slaves’ optimistic spirit of freedom was shattered by the rise of Jim Crow laws. It is that type of spiritual that is the root of the style of songs and singing that we now call Gospel Music.

The contrast between the styles of jubilee spirituals and slavery-time ones has been studied by many people, including the African-American poet, novelist and social activist Langston Hughes. There are many documented Christian religious spirituals from the times of slavery, but they are not about Christmas and Christ’s Nativity. Almost all of the slavery era’s spirituals refer to a powerful King Jesus, with an intention and capability to relieve his followers from oppression, and not about him being a helpless baby. Therefore, a spiritual like this one is likely to have been first sung during that brief post-emancipation and pre-Jim Crow period.

If you want to explore the history of this song, and the problems of documenting spirituals in general, besides Langston Hughes’ writings on the subject, I recommend you start with its Wikipedia entry and this article from a series about the history of songs sung in Methodist churches.

Rise up Shepherd is sung here by Odetta, arguably the most influential Black folksinger of all time. What do I mean by “influential”? Well, besides her leadership role in getting nearly the entire folk revival movement to actively support the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, her 1957 album At the Horn was cited by Bob Dylan as having spurred him into singing folk music (where he became a folk music icon before moving on to folk-rock and beyond.) This recording is from her 1960 Vanguard album Christmas Spirituals.

There’s a star in the east on Christmas morn,It will lead to the place where the Savior’s born,

[Refrain]Follow, follow,Rise up, shepherd, and followFollow the star of Bethlehem,Rise up, shepherd, and follow.

If you take good heed to the angel’s word,Rise up, shepherd, and follow,You’ll forget your flocks, you’ll forget your herd,Rise up, shepherd, and follow

Leave your sheep, and leave your lambsRise up, shepherd, and followLeave your ewes, and leave your ramsRise up, shepherd, and follow

[Refrain]

Born in BethlehemThis memory-challenging cumulative or counting song is known by many names including Little Bitty Baby and The Holy Baby, but it is generally titled by its opening line: Children Go Where I Send Thee. It is accepted as being a spiritual, and is often said to date back to the days of slavery in the US, but as discussed above that is unlikely.

The earliest reference that I can find to collection of the song was in 1934 by John and Alan Lomax, who recorded it from Black convicts at the Bellwood Labor Camp in Georgia while on the same collection trip where they first met Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter.

That is not to say that the song is not an authentic jubilee spiritual; there is certainly identified song-writer, and there are many variants in the wording, especially in the counting progression, which is evidence of considerable oral transmission. But the song does not appear in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s American Folk Songs for Christmas book, nor presumably in any of the early sources of African American songs that gathered songs from in her diligent research. She must have known about Children Go Where I Send Thee and if she thought that it was an authentic spiritual she would certainly have included it in her book.

Another reason to suspect that it is not an old spiritual is that none of the documented ones are cumulative songs. The history of this song is closely intertwined with a similar well-known cumulative song that has very early European roots. It is also known by various names and has many variants in both melody and lyrics. You’ll probably instantly recognize the song I am talking about from this first verse from one of its variants. . .

I’ll sing you one OGreen grow the rushes, OWhat is your one, O?One is one and all aloneAnd evermore shall be so.

. . . and/or from this first verse from many other variants:

Come and I will sing you,What will you sing me?I will sing you one-o.What will the one be?One the one that’s all alone and ever more shall be so.

That song, which also has many names, comes from long tradition of European memory-game songs. What the variants of that song and Born in Bethlehem have in common is that their counting progressions, while they vary considerably in specifics, are totally interchangeable. Unless the adaptation went the other way, the use of religious counting lyrics in a memory-game song might have been inspired by a 16th century Ashkenazi Passover teaching song for children called Echad Mi Yodea.

This song’s collection by the Lomaxes in 1934 coincides with the early growth of the Gospel singing movement, and the earliest recordings of Children Go Where I Send Thee (under its various names) were recorded by Black musical evangelists like Dennis Crumpton & Robert Summers (1936) and by Black quartets like the Golden Gate Quartet (1937) and the Heavenly Gospel Singers (1938). (You can listen to those early recordings through those links.) Gospel singing is rooted in spirituals but also includes newly-written songs. What they all have in common is that their singing is in the style of African-American worship singing.

Whenever this song came into being it is clearly from African-American roots and it has become a core Christmas song among gospel music singers, Black and White.

This version, with the full twelve verses, was arranged and recorded by The Blind Boys of Alabama, a group whose roots go back to 1939. It is from their 2003 album Go Tell It On The Mountain. The lead singer is Jimmy Carter, and he is accompanied by the great Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers.

In the style of gospel singing this song has so much improvisation and variations from verse to verse that it would be a transcription nightmare. I will only give you the first verse and the progression of numbered characters in the constantly growing verses.

Little children, go where I send thee.How will you send me? I’m gonna send thee one by one One for the little bitty baby.Born of the Virgin MaryBorn, born, born in Bethlehem.

2. Two was Paul and Silas …3. Three for the Hebrew children …4. Four for the four that stood at the door ...5. Five for the gospel preachers ...6. Six for the six that couldn’t get fixed ...7. Seven for the seven that couldn’t go to heaven ...8. Eight for the eight that stood at the gate ...9. Nine for the nine that dressed so fine ...10. Ten for the ten commandments ...11. Eleven for the gospel riders ...12. Twelve for the twelve disciples ...

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