Down to the River to Pray

The song's earliest print is in Slave Songs of the United States, published in New York in 1867, the first book of African American spirituals. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison compiled it, and number 104, The Good Old Way, came to them from George H. Allan of Nashville. Its singers went down in the valley to pray, not the river. The Fisk Jubilee Singers printed their own version as Come, Let Us All Go Down in 1880.

Some sources say the song appeared in The Southern Harmony in 1835. It did not. That book has a hymn called The Good Old Way with different words and a different tune, and the two keep getting confused. The river came later, and the song is often sung now at outdoor baptisms.

The tune people sing now is not the one in the 1867 book. It is a five-note melody that circles the d and comes to rest on the fifth, and it is the one on the old records: the Price Family Sacred Singers for Okeh in 1927, the Delta Big Four in 1929, Lead Belly for the Library of Congress in 1940, and Doc Watson in 1966. Alison Krauss's recording for O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000 made it famous all over again. Her arrangement is hers, and the song under it belongs to everybody.

On a mandolin in D the verse lives on the A course, with the d at the fifth fret doing most of the work, and the chorus climbs onto the E course for the f sharp and the a. It is mostly quarters and pairs of eighths, slow enough to tremolo the long notes, and the melody is so plain that the pick hand has nowhere to hide an uneven note.