In the Sweet By and By

This one was written in about half an hour, and the story comes from the man who wrote the words. S. Fillmore Bennett kept a drugstore in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Joseph Philbrick Webster, who wrote tunes and was prone to low spells, came in looking miserable one day in 1868, and when Bennett asked what was wrong Webster said it was no matter, it would be all right by and by. Bennett said the idea came to him like a flash of sunlight, asked whether that would not make a good hymn, and sat down at his desk. He wrote the verses while Webster set the music, and the two of them and two friends who happened to be in the store sang it through when they were done. Lyon and Healy published it in Chicago the same year.

It went everywhere. Hymnary.org counts it in six hundred and eighty one hymnals. It became a standard at funerals, and in New Orleans it is one of the tunes a brass band plays slow on the way to the cemetery and fast on the way back. Elvis Presley, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson all recorded it. Those records are under copyright and none of them is the source here. Webster's melody is public domain and has been for a very long time.

Webster also wrote the tune bluegrass players know as Wildwood Flower, published in 1860 under the title I'll Twine 'Mid the Ringlets, so a player who has both of these pages open is looking at two sides of the same composer: one parlor song that went down the mountain and turned into a guitar lesson, and one hymn that went into the hymnals and stayed.

The shape is plain and the refrain is the reason it is sung. The verse climbs to a held B, falls to a long D at the end of the first line, comes back around and finishes on G. Then the refrain starts high, on a held d, and says the same six words twice, once landing on a long A over the D chord and once a step lower, landing on a long G over the C chord. That drop is the whole feeling of the song and it costs the singer nothing.

On a mandolin this is a tremolo piece with a pickup habit. Six of its sixteen bars open on a note held three beats or more, so the right hand spends most of the song on an even tremolo and then has to arrive cleanly on the two eighth notes that lead into the next line. Practice those lead-ins on their own: G, A into the verse, A, B into the refrain's answer, and B, c into the refrain itself. The only stretch in the tune is the F sharp at the fourth fret of the D course near the end, and the little finger is already over it.