Merry Christmas!
Mary Had A Baby ....The Underground Railroad Christmas Spiritual!
Mary had a baby” appears in four versions in the Saint Helena Island South Carolina Spirituals.
“Mary had a baby, aye Lawd” is more familiar. ( No. 1, 46, page 40)
Mary Had a Baby
This variant contains a somewhat enigmatic phrase for today’s singers: “de people keep a comin’ and de train done gone is perhaps, a veiled reference to the underground railroad.
Mary had a leetle baby” and Mary had a baby Sing Hallelu are the two other versions.
Three Men Named John Work and The Julliard School Traced A Century Of African American Spirituals!
The origins of this Christmas spiritual are shrouded in the struggles of enslaved Africans. Folklorist Natalie Burlin ( born in eighteen seventy five provides one of the arrangements of the spiritual that the director of the Musical Art Society (now known as the Julliard School) presented as an old negro Christmas song, Mary’s Baby”.
Mary had a baby was heard at the Penn School in Saint Helena, South Carolina, where the Negroes are perhaps not infiltrated as much as by white civilization.
On the heels of this nineteen nineteen performance was the publication of the Saint Helena Island Spirituals, a collection of over a hundred songs.
John W. Work, who had been born into slavery in Kentucky, was a church choir director, whose members were part of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers. His son, John Work II, worked had a position teaching Latin and history at Fisk, where he also helped in the music department. As a historian, Work II and his brother Frederick joined forces to document Negro spirituals and publish them, including two collections in the first decade of the twentieth century. One of those collections included the song Go Tell It On The Mountain, a song which featured as heavily in the civil rights movement during the nineteen fifties and sixties as it does today in Christmas church services.
The musical Damrosch brothers, Walter and Frank, made connections for Ballanta that led him to the Penn Normal, located on Saint Helena Island, the center of African American Gullah culture. The Saint Helena Quartet was a fundraising and public relations ensemble of Penn Normal. The members of the Quartet were former singers and graduates of the Hampton Institute.
Nicholas George Julius Ballanta-Taylor a musicologist, organist, and composer born in Freetown, Sierra Leone performed and published one hundred thirteen Gullah Songs. He was awarded a scholarship to the Institute of Musical Art (now the Julliard School) and a diploma. Philanthropist George Peabody funded Ballanta’s research in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina, resulting in his contact with the Penn School and the publication of the Saint Helena Island Spirituals.