Angel Band

Jefferson Hascall was a Methodist minister, born in 1807, remembered in his own day as a preacher who could fill a room. He wrote the words in 1860, beginning "My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run". William B. Bradbury set them two years later in his Golden Shower of S.S. Melodies. Bradbury was one of the busiest tune writers in nineteenth century America, the man who also wrote the melodies everybody knows for Jesus Loves Me and He Leadeth Me, and this is the one of his that ended up in a bluegrass jam.

It got there through the Stanley Brothers, who recorded it in 1955, and it has closed gospel sets ever since. A new generation found it when it played over the closing credits of O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. Those are records and they belong to whoever made them. The 1860 words and the 1862 tune are in the public domain, which is why this page can carry the melody, and it carries only the melody: there are no words on it, because the ones people sing at a jam are half Hascall's and half whatever the singer grew up hearing.

The shape is unusual and worth noticing before you start. The verse is eight bars and the refrain is twelve, half again as long, which is backwards from most hymns and is why the song feels like it opens out rather than closing down. The refrain opens with two two bar answers, the dominant against the tonic, and then says one long four bar line twice over. That last repeat is nearly free: its first two bars are the two before them note for note, the third changes one note, and only the landing is different.

On a mandolin it is written here in D and sits between the F sharp at the fourth fret of the D course and the G at the third fret of the E course, so the hand never moves and never touches the G course. That leaves the whole job to the right hand, which suits the tune: most beats are a long note with a short one lifting into it, and the long ones are where a mandolin has to work. Pick the short lead-in, then tremolo the long note on the beat and stop the tremolo cleanly before the next lead-in, and the song will sound sung rather than picked.