A Song Too Sad to Often Sing
When Sam Mendes’s World War I movie, 1917, was released a couple of years ago, its breathtaking cinematography was much talked about. There was the fact it looked as if it had all been capture in one continuous, two-hour shot; there were the explosive scenes—shellfire, plane crashes — that accompanied its taut narrative. But one of its most affecting moments wasn’t especially visual at all. It was the sound of singing.
The soldier we’d be following throughout the film, on his journey to get a message across no man’s land, found himself in a wood, and from somewhere within it, he heard a melody weave its way toward him through the trees, rendered by a haunting and unaccompanied voice. Something about that simple music, and its plaintive, lonely cry for home, seemed to sum up everything that had gone before.
For many, particularly those audiences outside of the United States, it was the first time they had come across the song. ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ is not a well known tune in Britain, for instance, where Mendes hails from, and where my family and I watched the movie together. Many of my British friends were captivated by it, hearing it for the first time. It sounded like something not just from another age, but from a distant reality.
Even in the U.S., where ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ is a far better known folk song, it is surrounded by a certain obscurity. No one has ever claimed, definitively, to know its true origins. Musicologists and historians have argued about its genesis for decades. There seems to be some agreement that it can be traced back to the late 18th or early 19th century, although that’s just as far as the record goes back, and it might have been existence, in other, earlier forms, for even longer.
It seems appropriate, to me, that the song should retain its secret. Few songs are quite as capable of creating their own air of mystery. The dark, modal melody, its long held notes quavering with sentiment, is unsettlingly ambiguous; its lyrics, pining for a reunion with lost parents beyond the grave, are simple but enigmatic. It penetrates the ear like a quiet breath, and drifts round the skull like a visiting spirit. Listen to ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ and you hear something expressing the limits of human knowledge. It seems right that it should have escaped the butterfly nets and pins of the energetic song-hunters that have stalked so many ballads to their source. I would not want it tracked down, explained, or neatly categorized. There is power in its anonymity.
The song has only been in my own life for around a decade. Having grown up in the UK, a classical musician, a violinist trained to play Vivaldi and Mozart and Tchaikovsky, I had never encountered the folk songs of the United States. Nor did I know how closely they were linked with the indigenous music of my own country; that the traditional fiddle tunes of Scotland and Ireland, and the madrigals and ballads of the English countryside, had made their way to the Appalachian mountains, courtesy of the settlers’ ships that took indigent workers and curious families to a new life in the new world.
And then, rediscovering my instrument after years of negligence, I had discovered bluegrass, and the banjo of Earl Scruggs, and the mandolin of Bill Monroe. And one of the very first recordings that I ever came across—that a fellow fiddler urged me to listen to if I really wanted to understand the sentiment that lay behind the music—was that of Monroe singing ‘Wayfaring Stranger’ in 1958, his high tenor voice like a cry for mercy, his mandolin gently weeping with tender tremolo.
What did this rendition tell me about the music that I wanted, so badly, to understand, and to learn to emulate? It told me that it yearned. Its tone bore the sound of fragility, and yet could sustain the tensile strength and incisive capability of copper wire.
I made assumptions. I guessed, from its suggestion of the hard toil and dark clouds of this earthly world, from its hope for release and peace in “Jordan” beyond the grave, that it had been repurposed from the realm of the black spiritual, the songs that had come from fields of enslaved workers, longing for freedom from their captivity. Maybe it was, but if so, no one can prove it. It might, instead, be a German hymn, transported from Europe in the early 1800s. It might have been written by Portuguese settlers who lived peripatetically around the southern Appalachians.
What I did learn, what I could learn, was how widely it spread. How it grew in popularity with the revivalists, how it went west with the pioneers, how it bedded down with Civil War soldiers as they sought to survive the horrific conditions of Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Plenty of people in America, it seemed, could identify with that song—of suffering, and of longing for home, and of enduring hope.
And on it lived, throughout the 20th century, from Bill Monroe to Burl Ives, from Joan Baez to Johnny Cash. The versions might have remade it a little each time, but they rarely took it too far from its oblique, melancholy essence. It is a song both too complex and too simple to change willfully. It does not bend easily to the whims of others. I’ve sensed that, too. From the moment you sing the opening words, and take that first interval leap, the melody owns you, not the other way round.
It is a song too sad to sing often, particularly at times like these. The loneliness of lockdown seems to infuse it with new meaning. None of us are wayfaring much these days, after all, thanks to travel restrictions and closed borders. Before the pandemic, I had become used to visiting the Appalachians once or twice a year; the mountains had become my second home. My own experience of them had indeed been a traveler’s tale; I roamed about them for years, playing bluegrass at jams in hardware stores and soda shops, in friends’ garages and on strangers’ porches. I miss those times, those people, those moments of musical connection.
But there is comfort in ‘Wayfaring Stranger,’ too. It is a song that reminds me that even in my loneliness, I am not alone. It is a song that teaches me that whatever I experience or endure, others have been here before me. I know dark clouds will gather round me; I know my way is rough and steep; but beauteous fields lie there before me. Some would say we won’t know the true meaning of the song until we reach them. But I think the extraordinary power of the song is that we have to live with not knowing.
A review of Emma John’s book 'Wayfaring Stranger'
About the author: Emma Johns is the author of Wayfaring Stranger: A Musical Journey in the American South. This memoir follows her journey to master one of the hardest musical styles on earth—and to find her place, as a classically trained violinist, in the Appalachian mountains. Wayfaring Stranger is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.