Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Ada R. Habershon wrote the words and Charles H. Gabriel wrote the music, and the song was published in 1907. It appears the next year in Alexander's Gospel Songs as number 55, under a copyright taken out by the evangelist Charles M. Alexander, whose meetings the song was written for. Habershon was English, a Bible teacher and the author of hundreds of hymn texts; Gabriel was an Iowa farm boy who taught himself at a reed organ and ended up writing or arranging thousands of gospel songs. Both the 1907 words and the 1907 tune are in the public domain.

What almost everybody sings at a jam is not that text. In 1935 the Carter Family recorded "Can the Circle Be Unbroken (Bye and Bye)", with A. P. Carter's rewrite: the same tune and the same shape, but new verses about a hearse coming up the road and an undertaker asked to drive slow. That record is the reason the song is in the bluegrass repertoire at all, and it became the best selling record of its year. The rewrite is a real piece of writing and it is still under copyright, which is why this page carries the melody and no words at all. The tune is everybody's. The 1935 verses are not.

The song is built so a room can join in without being taught. The verse and the chorus are the same eight bars of rhythm, the chords are three, and the melody moves mostly in steps with one leap up to open the chorus. Both halves start with a two note pickup into the bar, which is the part that trips people at speed: come in a beat early, on the word before the downbeat, or you will be chasing the band the whole way.

On a mandolin it stays in first position and never goes past the fifth fret. The lowest note is the B below middle C, the fourth fret of the G course, and the highest is the D on the A course, so the tune sits across the middle of the instrument where it is easy to sing along with. Most of the bars park on a long note for two or three beats, which makes this a good place to practice tremolo with a purpose: hold those notes while the band moves underneath and let the short notes at the end of the bar carry the words.