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Blood-Strained Banders
See: Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying
See: Hear de Lambs A-Cryin'
Old-time spiritual, rock song.
ARTIST: Collected from the aging blind blues player Jimmie Strothers as "Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders," by Alan Lomax and Harold Spivacke on behalf of the Library of Congress in 1936.
SHEET MUSIC: http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiBLDSTRND;ttBLDSTRND.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=i_J4Ii9oArsC&pg=PA25&lpg=PA24&dq=blood+stained+banders&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html
CATEGORY: Traditional and Public Domain Gospel Songs
DATE: 1800s (Hear de Lambs A-Cryin') Fenner 1874; 1936
RECORDING INFO: Blood Stained Banders
Folksmiths. We've Got Some Singing to Do, Folkways FA 2407, LP (1958), trk# B.02
Strothers, Jimmie. Lomax, John A. & Alan Lomax / Our Singing Country, MacMillan, Sof (2000/1941), p 24 [1936]
RELATED TO: "Good Shepherd," “Hear de Lambs A-Cryin'”
OTHER NAMES: "Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders"
PRINT SOURCES: Hampton and Its Students by Mary Frances Armstrong, Helen Wilhelmina Ludlow, Thomas P. Fenner (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1874), page 210
Lomax, John A. & Alan Lomax / Our Singing Country, MacMillan, Sof (2000/1941), p 24 [1936]
NOTES: “Blood-Strained Banders” was recorded by the aging blind blues player Jimmie Strothers as "Keep Away from the Bloodstained Banders," for Alan Lomax and Harold Spivacke on behalf of the Library of Congress in 1936.
Strothers accompanied himself on four-string banjo, an instrument upon which his skill was well-regarded. Coming from the Appalachian part of Virginia, Strothers had lost his sight in a mine explosion and had made a living playing on street corners and in medicine shows. Blind, itinerant street singers like Strothers were part of the tradition that kept African-American religious music alive. The recording was made at the Virginia State Prison Farms in Lynn, Virginia, where Strothers was serving time for having murdered his wife with an axe. Lomax thought prisons were a good place to find old songs, and was also interested in illustrating the interaction of white and black music. This haunting recording was part of what Allmusic describes as a "group of songs that explore the boundaries between the sacred and the profane."
Blood-Stained Banders- Jimmie Strothers 1936 From Our Singing Country, Lomax
If you want to get to heaven,
Just over on the other shore,
Keep out the way of the blood-stained banders
O good shepherd, feed my sheep
CHORUS: Some for Paul,
Some for Silas,
Some for to make-a my heart rejoice.
Don't you hear the lambs a-crying?
O good shepherd, feed my sheep.
If you want to get to heaven,
Just over on the other shore,
Keep out the way of the gunshot devil
O good shepherd, feed my sheep
(Chorus)
If you want to get to heaven,
Just over on the other shore,
Keep out the way of the long-tongued liars
O good shepherd, feed my sheep
Much speculation has arisen about what the title means. Lomax commented in "Our Sining Country": "The name was probably a corruption of "Blood Stained Bandits". Art Thieme thinks the name could be "Blood-Stained Banners."
From Wiki: "Blood-stained Banders" has been called a "dark homily [that] bubbles up archaic invectives for the devil that huddles behind every stranger's face." Strothers' recording of "Blood-stained Banders" was described in the 1941 book Our Singing Country by Alan Lomax and his father John A. Lomax, with the transcription being done by Ruth Crawford Seeger.
The recording was released in 1942 by the Library of Congress as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L3 Folk Music of the United States: Afro American Spirituals, Work Songs and Ballads, a collection of field recordings including those by State Penitentiary and State Farm prisoners. It first appeared on 78 rpm records, then was released again on LP album in the mid-1960s. In 1998, it was issued by Rounder Records on Compact Disc as Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs & Ballads, which is also available from the Library of Congress. It also appears on the CD The Ballad Hunter, Parts VII and VIII from the Library of Congress, originally issued as Archive of Folk Song, Recording Laboratory AFS L52 in 1941.
Transcribed in 2/2 time, the Strothers recording's rhythm and melody are somewhat similar but still measurably different from what would come later. Not a Negro spiritual per se, it was not listed in the top 500 spirituals in a listing of some 6,000 constructed by scholar John Lovell, Jr. in 1972.
In 1953, Ruth Crawford Seeger collected and transcribed the song as "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" in her acclaimed volume American Folk Songs for Christmas. Dartmouth College music professor Larry Polansky comments that in doing so, Ruth Crawford Seeger took the hard-edged gospel blues and "revoice[d] it as a beautiful, shape-note influenced hymn."
The "Blood Stained Banders" form was then recorded by The Folksmiths in 1958 on their Folkways Records LP We've Got Some Singing to Do. This was an effort organized by Joe Hickerson, who would become director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. We've Got Some Singing to Do and its accompanying songbook were distributed to a number of summer camps, and were responsible for the popularization of several freedom-longing African-American songs such as "Kum Ba Yah". The song was circulating in folk circles in other forms as well, and Pete Seeger published a variant with a more explicitly political message, called "If You Want To Go To Freedom", in the mimeographed-but-influential Broadside Magazine in 1963.
Meanwhile, a recording of the Ruth Crawford Seeger "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying" was done for the 1989 album American Folk Songs for Christmas by Peggy Seeger, Mike Seeger, and Penny Seeger. Dartmouth's Polansky then arranged the song under that title for strings in 1999, which was premiered at that year's Spoleto Music Festival.
The original strain of "Blood-Stained Banders" is still played; Bobby Horton recorded it in 2003 with an extended guitar part, as part of the soundtrack for the Ken Burns documentary Horatio's Drive. Hickerson also still performs the tune in the 2000s.
Origins: “Blood-Strained Banders” is a gospel song based on the old spiritual "Hear de Lambs A-Cryin'." Ruth Crawford Seeger collected a version titled, "Don't You Hear The Lambs A-Crying."
HEAR DE LAMBS A-CRYIN'- Fenner 1874 (for complete lyrics; see: Hear de Lambs)
CHORUS: You hear de lambs a-cryin',
Hear de lambs a-cryin',
Hear de lambs a-cryin',
Oh, shepherd, feed-a my sheep.
1. Our Saviour spoke dese words so sweet:
"Oh shepherd, feed-a my sheep."
Said, "Peter, if ye love me, feed my sheep."
Oh, shepherd, feed-a my sheep.
Oh, Lord, I love Thee, Thou dost know.
Oh, shepherd, feed-a my sheep.
Oh, give me grace to love Thee mo'.
Oh, shepherd, feed-a my sheep.
This song was the basis of The Jefferson Airplane's song "Good Shepherd" by Jorma Kaukonen:
"'Good Shepherd' was a song that I learned from a guy named Roger Perkins, who was a folk singer, and my friend Tom Hobson, and it was a great spiritual that I really liked," said Jorma. "It's a psychedelic folk-rock song."
Wiki: "Blood-Stained Banders" was thus the proximate source for what was taught to guitarist Jorma Kaukonen by folk singer Roger Perkins and friend Tom Hobson in the early 1960s. Kaukonen had grown up in Washington, D.C. and around the world as the son of a diplomat, then had migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area where he became a lover of various folk revival styles, especially acoustic blues and downhome blues. The song became part of Kaukonen's repertoire as he played around San Francisco clubs, well before he joined Jefferson Airplane. Kaukonen continued to evolve musically; the enticement of exploring the technology around the electric guitar led him to join the Airplane.
Now titled simply "Good Shepherd", a recording of the song became Kaukonen's major showcase number on the Airplane's 1969 Volunteers album, where it avoided the political topicality of the most visible tracks on the rest of the album. "Good Shepherd" encompassed elements of both gospel and blues in its playing and showed that folk roots were still quite present in the Airplane's mixture of sounds and influences that led to psychedelic rock.
Indeed, folk music underlay many aspects of the San Francisco psychedelic sound, with the Airplane as a prime example. The recording of "Good Shepherd", which took place from late March to late June 1969, featured a rare Kaukonen lead vocal backed by mellow harmonies from the group. Its arrangement incorporated Kaukonen's sharp, stinging electric guitar lines set against an acoustic guitar opening,[47] with singer Grace Slick wordlessly doubling Kaukonen's guitar line during the instrumental break. The track was considered a beautiful standout on the album. Kaukonen himself later referred to it as "a great spiritual that I really liked. It's a psychedelic folk-rock song."
In an article referring to this CD, called "From Bauhaus to Shoehouse"
(by Bob Tarte, The Beat magazine, Volume 17, Number 2, 1998,) one finds:
Axe murderer Jimmy Strothers' dark homily "Blood-Stained Banders" bubbles up archaic invectives for the devil that huddles behind every stranger's face. (Jefferson Airplane fans will recognize this song as the source of "Good Shepherd" on 1969's Volunteers).
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