Harvard was the center for folklore studies in the United States when early versions of "Come by Here" were collected. Francis James Child began publishing his definitive collection of English and Scots ballads there in 1882. [1] His successor, George Kittredge, has been mentioned in connection with Carl Carmer [2] and John Lomax. [3] After the latter published his collection of cowboy songs, [4] Lomax encouraged others to organize state organizations to collect local lore. [5]
Among those who responded was an English professor at Trinity College, later Duke University. In 1913 Frank Brown organized the North Carolina Folklore Society. [6] Former students and society members sent him collections, which he augmented with his own field work. [7]
Julian Parks Boyd heeded his call and asked his white high school students in Alliance, North Carolina, to "collect traditional songs from their friends and families in the rural community around the school." Minnie Lee submitted a version of "O Lord. Won’t You Come by Here?" in 1926. [8]
Boyd was born in western South Carolina where his immigrant ancestor settled on land granted in 1773 by George III in what became Newberry County of the Ninety-Six District. [9] John Boyd’s son, Nathan, converted to Methodism, and became a preacher, as did his sons and grandsons. One, George McPherson Boyd, was Julian’s grandfather. [10]
Between the time Julian’s father, Robert Jay Boyd. was born in 1875 and 1900, his father held thirteen assignments. [11] Robert was living in Converse Mill Village near Spartanburg when Julian was born. [12] Whether Robert was a hand in a textile mill or a mechanic servicing equipment or held some other white-collar job is not known.
Julian’s life is a blank between his birth and his rebirth as a college graduate in 1925. The Converse mills had suffered a devastating flood just months before he was born: 4,300 people lost their jobs. [13] One rather suspects his father moved, but when and where is speculation.
Boyd’s first job out of college was in Alliance, where he stayed one school year, and used his earnings to enter the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he was hired to edit "The Susquehanna Company Papers for the Wyoming Historical and Genealogical Society." He then moved from historical society to historical society, until he was hired by Princeton’s library in 1940. He edited the papers of Thomas Jefferson, and, in 1952, was granted a faculty position in the history department. [14]
Duke University began publishing Brown’s collection in 1952. The editors for the ballad and song volumes were Henry Belden and Arthur Palmer Hudson. The first was active in Missouri; [15] the other taught at the University of North Carolina. [16] The music editor, Jan Philip Schinhan, was educated in Austria and joined the University of North Carolina music faculty in 1935. [17]
The first five volumes of Brown’s collection contained 112 items sent by Boyd with the names of sixteen people. Some items were anonymous, and may have been collected by Boyd himself. In addition, he sent superstitions from Ware County that were included in volumes six and seven of the Brown series.
While Brown and his editors appreciated Boyd’s work, Boyd discovered "the school board and the community in general seem to think that [collecting folksongs] is an obnoxious practice, for some uncertain reason." [18] It’s not clear what taboo Boyd broke: race, class, religion, or region.
Thirty-two items were ballads of the type publicized by Child, and made famous in 1917 by Cecil Sharp when he discovered Child ballads still existed in the southern Appalachians. [19] One would think these were not controversial.
However, the largest number of songs contributed by Boyd were religious or from minstrel shows. The two categories overlapped because many of the religious songs were humorous and/or used Negro dialect. A number in different categories were identified as "Negro fragments." Only two students did not submit materials from any of these groups: Clifton McCotter and Carlos Holton.
Some parents may have thought material from the popular stage did not belong in schools whose goals was to prepare the young for elevated positions in the local social and economic hierarchy. Others may have been offended by the implication something other than hymns could be considered important.
The county was a swampy peninsula between the Neuse and Pamlico rivers that supported no commercial crops. Before the Civil War, the largest land owner grew corn with 31 slaves. [20] Clifton’s great-grandfather’s brother, Joseph McCotter, usually had 25 adult slaves and their children on the Neuse River mouth of Broad Creek across from New Bern. [21] Farmers raised cash by producing turpentine, rosin, pitch, tar and other naval supplies needed by shipbuilders in New Bern. [22]
First Day Baptists had tried to organize on the Neuse side of the peninsula in 1740, when dissenters were banned. [23] After the American Revolution, they succeed in establishing their first church on Goose Creek in 1784. [24] The other important denomination after the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 was the Disciples of Christ. Neither they nor the Free Will Baptists were large enough to erect buildings or support full-time clergymen. Instead, the Vandemere church historians thought congregations met in private homes. [25]
During the Civil War, Union forces seized New Bern, [26] and slaves from surrounding plantations fled to the port where they worked for the military. [27] Joseph McCotter’s family remembered "The night the slaves found out they had been freed, all but one of them from the McCotter Plantation took the largest boat from its moorings and sailed away towards New Bern, NC." [28]
The government set up the James City camp for African Americans on land appropriated from an abandoned plantation. [29] After the end of Reconstruction, Democrats in the state legislature gerrymandered the state’s election districts so all the Blacks were in the one district of New Bern. To strengthen their power, they lopped off the areas of Craven and Beaufort counties with white majorities and called it Pamlico County in 1872. [30] A first cousin of Clifton’s great-grandfather, Richard Dawson McCotter, was elected to the legislature twice. [31]
In 1873, the county seat was established in Vandemere, [32] a port on the Bay River. The Baptists and Disciples were meeting in Ulysses Cicero Holton’s store. [33] The son of Clifton’s great-grandfather’s brother, John Robert McCotter, offered land for a church building in 1885. When they met, they decided to make it a Methodist building. [34]
The Methodist church had been insignificant before the Civil War, when it was seen as supporting abolitionists. The denomination had split over slavery in 1844, and after the war Southern Methodists became the church for whites. [35]
Methodist freed men were in their separate denominations, and not likely to join the mother church. [36] In contrast, Mt. Zion Free Will Baptist Church in Vendemere "once had a balcony for slaves to sit in" [37], although the denomination invited freedmen to form their own churches in 1866. [38]
Pamlico county had even less of an economic base than when it was the lowland section of Craven County. Poor farmers in the county organized against the railroads and their high tariffs. Alliance was named for the organization. [39] The populist Farmers’ Alliance movement coincided with the spread of radical forms of Holiness. The Southern Methodist church disowned the movement in 1894, and began redefining itself as the upper class alternative. Two women distinctly remembered the Vandemere church was "a very friendly church, but not a ‘shouting’ church." [40]
In Alliance, the Methodist Church was built next to the family cemetery of Clifton’s grandfather, Benjamin Franklin McCottle.
One suspects Boyd offended Methodist parents who shrank from the lower class associations of emotional churches and the informality of camp meetings where the humorous religious songs were sung.
However, he may simply have been a political pawn: a new man became county school superintendent in 1927. [41]
Graphics
"Map of Pamlico County North Carolina With Municipal and Township Labels." U. S. Census Bureau, July 2007. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ruhrfisch, 4 July 2007.
End Notes
Information on the various McCotters is from Ancestry, Find a Grave, My Heritage, NC Gen, and Wiki Tree websites.
1. Francis James Child. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, ten volumes, 1882–1898.
2. Carl Carmer was discussed in the post for 23 January 2019.
3. John Lomax’s education was discussed in the post for 27 January 2019.
4. Details on Lomax’s collection of cowboy songs appeared in the post for 27 January 2019.
5. Wikipedia. "John Lomax."
6. W. E. King. "Brown, Frank Clyde." NC Pedia website. 1979.
7. Newman Ivey White. "General Introduction." 1–28 in Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore. Durham: Duke University Press, 1952. Volume 1, edited by Paul G. Brewster, et al. 14.
8. Stephen Winick. "The World’s First ‘Kumbaya’ Moment: New Evidence about an Old Song." Folklife Center News 34:3–10:Summer/Fall2010. 4.
9. George Leland Summer. Newberry County, South Carolina: Historical and Genealogical Annals. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1980. 197.
10. DSM. "Robert Jay Boyd, Sr." Find a Grave website. 6 February 2011. Julian’s father.
Dowd/Powell/Bartley/Hare. "Rev George McPherson Boyd." Find a Grave website. 13 April 2006. Julian’s grandfather.
Duvall. "Rev Mark Moore Boyd." Find a Grave website. 20 April 2012. Julian’s great-grandfather.
Michael Bell. "Rev Nathan Boyd." Find a Grave website. 12 August 2010. Julian’s great-great-grandfather.
11. Watson Boone Duncan. "Rev. Geo. M. Boyd." 55–56 in Twentieth Century Sketches of the South Carolina Conference, M.E. Church, South. Columbia, South Carolina: South Carolina Conference, 1901.
12. Wikipedia. "Julian P. Boyd."
13. Sharon. "Clifton Manufacturing, SC." Sharon Scrapbook website. 26 October 2010.
14. James Russel Wiggins. "Julian Parks Boyd." American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 90:291–299:1980. 291.
15. Rebecca B. Schroeder. "Belden, Henry Marvin." Dictionary of Missouri Biography. Edited by Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, and Gary Kremer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. 52–53.
16. "Arthur Palmer Hudson Papers, 1915-1967." University of North Carolina , Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library website.
17. "Schinhan, Jan Philip, 1887-1975." Social Networks and Archival Context website.
18. Winick. 4.
19. Cecil James Sharp and Olive Dame Campbell. English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917.
20. Joe A. Mobley. Pamlico County: A Brief History. Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1991. 17.
21. Linda Dail. "Descendants of Hezekiah McCotter." NC Gen website.
22. Mobley, Pamlico. 4.
23. Mobley, Pamlico. 11. First Day Baptists, in fact, were Anabaptists.
24. "Craven County, North Carolina Genealogy." Family Search website.
25. Annette Hill Jones, Gladys Ford Sodoma, and Salona Jensen McCotter. The History of Vandemere United Methodist Church. Baltimore: Otter Bay Books, 2010. 13.
26. Mobley, Pamlico. 36.
27. Mobley, Pamlico. 38.
28. Dail.
29. Joe A. Mobley. James City. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Division of Archives and History, 1981.
30. Mobley, Pamlico. 50–53.
31. Mobley, Pamlico. 93.
32. Jones. 20. The county seat later was moved to Bayboro.
33. Jones. 13. I couldn’t learn enough about Carlos or Ulysses Holton to define their kinship.
34. Jones. 15.
35. Jones. 15. "At that time in history, the Methodist Churches attended by whites in the New Bern District area were Methodist Episcopal Churches, South."
36. Jones. 15.
37. Jones. 18.
38. T. F. Harrison and J. M. Barfield. History of the Free Will Baptists of North Carolina. Ayden, North Carolina: Free Will Baptist Press, 1898. 265, 266.
39. Mobley, Pamlico. 95.
40. Mrs. Vera and Mrs. Trixie. Quoted by Jones. 17.
41. Mobley, Pamlico. 114. Herbert C. Banks replaced Taylor B. Attmore.
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