A death song of an Indian chief: and The bright god of day

One of the most interesting aspects of the broadside treatment of “A Death Song of an Indian Chief” by Scotswoman Anne Home Hunter (1742-1821) is the expansion of her original lyrics (verses 1-4) to eleven verses in this exemplar and to sixteen verses in a version published by Leonard Deming in the 1830s. Of the added verses, it is unlikely that a cultivated lady would ever have penned a line like “I fry in the flames” (verse 9). The semireligious tone of the added verses and the quick shift from first to third person in the last verse are also characteristic of broadside verse composition.

In his exhaustive essay on “The Indian Chief,” John Koegel reviews the evidence of Hunter’s authorship of the original song, written around 1780 (437-508). Because it was not socially acceptable for a woman to acknowledge writing songs, she originally published the text anonymously. When she did publish a collection of her Poems in 1802, she may have been unwilling to reveal that she herself had written the text or adapted the tune. Introducing the text she said

the idea of this ballad was suggested several years ago by hearing a gentleman, who has resided several years in America amongst the tribe or nation called the Cherokees, sing a wild air, which he assured me it was customary for those people to chaunt with a barbarous jargon, implying contempt for their enemies in the moments of torture and death. I have endeavoured to give something of the characteristic spirit and sentiment of those brave savages. We look upon the fierce and stubborn courage of the dying Indian with a mixture of respect, pity, and horror; and it is those sensations excited in the mind of the reader, that the Death song must owe its effect. It has already been published with the notes to which it was adapted. (80)

Hunter’s tune is not of Indian derivation, but owes much to British American style of melody. It is reminiscent of a tune by James Oswald that was used for a text in The Reprisal (1757), the opening line being “From the man whom I love” (see The British Lamentation).

Hunter’s song was immensely popular, copied into manuscript song and tune books, and printed in songsters with and without the music into the twentieth century in both Britain and the United States, appearing in sixty-two songsters between 1788 and 1820. The song was frequently entitled “Alknomook” in American sources (Koegel; R. Keller, Early American Secular Music and Its European Sources). It seems to have established a “death song” tradition as a new song appeared almost immediately using her words but not the same tune. This was “The Celebrated Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” (ca. 1785/86), attributed to Stephen Paxton. The “noble savage” was used as a theme in the theater and in other songs and the popular “Indian Chief” tune continued to be used for other texts through the nineteenth century; among early examples were a moralizing text beginning “My good father died at the age of four-score” (1805) and a shape note hymn called “Morality” published by John Wyeth in his Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (Koegel 475, 497-98).

The early eighteenth-century pastoral lyric “The Bright God of Day” was originally titled “The Vocal Grove.” With lyrics by William Monlass and music by Charles Young, it was first printed around 1710 (Schnapper 2:1099). The song was parodied in ballad operas (see The Cobler of Preston, 1732) and was set by Haydn in 1792 (Moss 200-203). It was copied by several American tune book compilers in the 1790s and appeared in ten songsters between 1797 and 1810 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).