O Susanna

 "Something so old no one knows it", 

quotes "Oxford American, a Magazine of the South" in 2012.  The article inspects recent recordings and the political, historical, and racial nuances of the old song.   I'm more practical as a musician:  I want to know "How does the song actually go so we can sing it as the author intended and the audience will like it?"  Well, they're right:  nobody quite knows how it goes.











Steven Foster wrote the words and tune in the late 1840's, but the sheet music publications of 1848 don't agree on the details of O Susanna's exact words or rhythms.  Two sheets claim "oldest publication" in 1948. New York's C. Hold Jr. publication displays "Christy Minstrels" and "G.N. Christy" prominently.  Baltimore's F.D. Benteen credits "The Ethiopian Serenaders" and "Wells" for singing and writing it.     Music Publisher W.C. Peters of Cincinnati had known and worked with Stephen Foster before.
Stephen Foster isn't credited on any of them, so none gets preference.  

Gosh, his manuscript would be priceless, but it's nowhere to be found yet. "Beautiful Dreamer" and "Old Black Joe", we've got the mss copied online, if you care to pay to peek at them.
 

Where the written versions differ, I can use original recordings, but not for O Susanna.  The first well-known recording, made in 1925 by vaudeville performer Arthur Fields, sounds familiar  with skipping rhythms and a bright bounce.   He doesn't sing the rhythms consistently, but he includes all four disaster-riddled verses with cheery delivery.   So it does serve as an early popular example of how at least one fellow sung it and sold a lot of copies, but decades after Stephens death in 1864 doesn't really tell us why the song was so popular in the first place

But this isn't 1848,  it's 2019.  So the question becomes, "How do people like to hear and sing it now".   To answer that, you do a survey of regular folks and what they recall of the song.   After interviewing a half-dozen folks, I learned this:

~ Almost everyone knows of "Oh, Susanna" and heard it in elementary school.
~ Almost everyone sings it in a lively tempo and snappy rhythmms

~ Everybody sings the words "Oh!, Susanna" on the notes fa fa la la, ...
~ Nobody has heard it sung fa fa fa la (as most early editions write it.)


~ Almost everyone fumbles the words.

~ Almost everyone remembers "banjo on my knee"
~ But are unsure if it's "a banjo" or "my banjo".   (It's "my" in the sheet music.)
~ A few mention the word isn't "going", it's "gwine" and important to keep.
~ Most know about "come from", "Lou'siana", and "Alabama"...
~ but not exactly where "I come from" or "I'm gwine to".

~ Early editions start "I come", but a few singers start with "Oh, I come..."

~ Most know about a verse about "It rained" "the weather".  Many can sing parts it.
~ Some know about a verse about a "dream the other night".  Few can sing parts of it.
~ Few heard of a verse about New Orleans, maybe.  None could sing any of it.
~ No one knows anything about a verse "riding a telegraph".


Those tell what's familiar and wanted in a sing-along:

I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee. 
I'm gwine to Lou'siäna my true love for to see.
It rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry,
The sun so hot I froze to death.  Suzanna, don't you cry.

Oh, Suzanna, Oh don't you cry for me.
I come from Alabama with my banjo on my knee.

I had a dream the other night when ev'ry thing was still.
I though I saw Suzänna a-comin' down the hill.
The buckwheat cake was in her mouth, a tear was in her eye.
I said "I'm comin' from the South.  Suzanna, don't you cry."

Oh, Suzanna, Oh don't you cry for me.
I come from Alabama with my banjo on my...

 And I bet, if  the singers stop right there, the audience will still sing:

                                                                          ... knee.

Arrangement Difficulty ratings

Hi Gary,
What is it that determines the degree of difficulty of a song?  With recordings, now available, and with 
the different voices prominent, isn't this "rating" 
still important?

Thanks,
DH

Good question.

"Difficulty ratings", even in carefully defined fields like piano playing, are always somewhat subjective. 
Barbershop Harmony website that lists all the arrangements and their difficulties as "easy", "medium" or "hard" makes "Hello, Mary Lou" the standard as a medium difficulty.   I agree.

Any director will  look for things that are neither way too easy nor way to hard in all of several areas:

Barbershop voicing.  (Leads have a hard time learning harmony for more than a few notes)
Range of the parts. (Highest note and lowest note of each part)
Tessitura of the parts.   (Where the part mostly lies:  staying low or high is harder)
Leaps in the harmony parts.  (lots are hard; few are easy)
Key center shifts (are interesting, but hard. "folks dressed up like Eskimos")
Harmonic complexity. (Many accidentals make for tricky singing)
Rhythmic complexity.  (counterpoint and drum-like parts are fun, but tricky)

This demands that directors have a good assessment of their group, what they can do, and how well they do it.  Even one "too difficult" area can make the song never quite fly.

As a side note about considering arrangements for programming, you also consider:

General popularity of the song at its heyday (and if your target audience will know it)

Mood and style of the piece (is it fresh or repetitive in your repertoire?)

I Heard the Bells.

Here are the Lyrics:
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day"  1867
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Till, ringing singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

I love this song for several reasons:

Every verse takes a different mood, as the author takes an emotional journey through observation, cogitation, rejection, recognition and revelation.   Henry felt real emotions when writing this on Christmas day 1863:  He still bore physical and emotional scars from a 1861 fire that killed his wife Frances, when he heard that his soldier son Charlie had been badly (possibly fatally) wounded in November 1863 in the US Civil war that Henry did not support.  In reading or singing the words, every verse takes a different tone, speed and feeling while still repeating (like the bells) the words "Peace on Earth, good will to men".

Several very good composers have written melodies to the poem.   Johnny Marks has a version of it, written alongside the songs he wrote for the 1964 stop-motion "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer".  It it was not included in the TV production, but it is often recorded beautifully by solo singers from Bing Crosby above   to Rockapella. 

The melody and harmony in the "Yuletide Favorites" book (without all the lyrics, thus this post) was made in 1872 when the British church organist and composer John Baptiste Calkin discovered that a melody he'd written in 1848 named "Waltham" fit the poem flawlessly.  His music is found across England and back to the USA in many hymn-books.   Choirs and congregations still use Calkin's melody.


 
The Timberliner's Chorus  will add this song to their Yuletide repertoire for 2012.  We already own copies, the harmonies are well-suited to barbershop style, and I'm especially fond of the "mu" chord first heard on the word "wild".

Harmonic Vocabulary

Dear Hal,

You raised a fabulous question I've been chewing on: "dumbing down arrangements", especially on "Almost". Since I write in a lot of styles, it's a conscious choice for me, and I'll explain why:

it's a matter of using a vocabulary your audience understands.

If the audience was just you and me, for example, we could sing 12-tone rows and poly-chordal arrangements, and groove on those. I've written some of those. Contemporary acapella lovers can go pretty far afield with nameless chords, poly-rhythms and hair-pin changes of style - if that's your audience, you write for them. I suppose the far extreme might be cartoon character Hank (King of the) Hill saying "I like both kinds of music, country AND western." - for Hank's ilk, you don't even sing a 6th chord because they'd hear those chords as "errors"

Kinda like singing in Latin or French - right for the right crowd & wrong for the wrong crowd - depends on how well your audience knows the vocabulary by the time you are done.

Now consider what little we know of the judges of the Forest Grove Barbershop Ballad competition and the opinions of the coach we had who has judged that event. Recall in "Nose to Nose" that his ear objected to the no-fifth chord at the end and wanted a full chord. In "Wink", one sixteenth note of an open fifth chord ("old jalopy") needed a third to be fixed, and we did it and will do it. But this gives us a strong clues on what vocabulary his barbershop audience will understand - and it doesn't include 2 note chords. By extrapolation, most of the audiences we will have will understand BBS style, since our agent Tom's contacts are in that world.

"Almost" uses vocabulary the barbershop crowd will ALMOST but not quite understand: open fifth beginning, (to that ear, making our first sound to sound "wrong") major 7 9 6 chords in tag ("al-most like"), and the swipe ending the intro.

Generally, the mutually exclusive alternatives are:

• present and teach a new language entertainingly.
• let the audience dislike what you are doing.
• cater to the audience's familiarities
  

For this barbershop competition, the choices are

1. re-arrange the tune to the style (I don't like the idea - the arrangement we have has it's own quirky charm, and I personally LIKE those quirks, so we use it in less judgmental moments in performance)
2. accept the distrust the audience will give us by doing it the way we like, but hopefully redeeming ourselves by educating those ears to a new vocabulary (Don't like this risky plan, either) or
3. choose a different tune for that audience.

Simplest and most respectful answer: choose a different tune.

Yours, Gary