Wayfaring Stranger

The lyrics reached print in 1858, in Bever's Christian Songster. The melody is a nineteenth century American folk hymn that hymnal editors trace back into the Southern Harmony tradition of 1835, and folklorists file it as Roud 3339. The song itself has been public domain for a very long time. The famous recordings are not, so this page carries the tune the way the tradition does, without leaning on any one singer's version. Burl Ives had a hit with it in 1944, Johnny Cash cut it in 2000 with lyrics of his own, and it turns up in films often enough that most people know it without knowing where from.

The mode gives the piece its character. It is natural minor throughout, where a classroom would expect harmonic minor, and the F natural in the second strain is the note that says so out loud. No source raises the sixth degree. If it sounds older and stranger than a minor key usually sounds, that is why.

The form is two strains that answer each other. The verse walks up and down between the A and the e above it and stays close to home. The second strain, the one that carries "I'm going there to see my Father", climbs to the flat sixth and flat seventh on "I'm only going over Jordan" and hangs there before its last four bars come back down and recap the verse. It is a small tune with one big lift in it, and that lift is much of why it has lasted.

On a mandolin the open A and E courses do half the work, and the fretted notes stop at the fifth fret, so the left hand stays in first position from start to finish. The long notes are where the tune lives. They are written as struck notes because a pick has to start them somewhere, but they want tremolo, and a bar of even tremolo on the held e is the difference between reading this tune and playing it. This is the first real minor key air on the shelf, and the first page on the site where the tremolo matters more than the notes.