American Bardold songs, sung again
Nineteen recordings of songs America wrote before anyone could record them — each one traced back to the year, the singer and the accident that put it into the world.
What this is
These songs outlived the people who wrote them, then outlived the people who sang them, and most are now known from one dusty recording or one line in a hymnal. I record them again — in the arrangement the era would recognise — and then I write down everything I can find about where each one came from.
Every recording here is produced with AI voice and instrumentation, and says so on its own page. The songs are in the public domain; the arrangements and the research are mine.
The archive
The twelve principal recordings, by the year each song first surfaces in print or on record. Christmas sides and alternate takes stay on the channel.
- 1779
Amazing Grace
John Newton wrote the words as a sermon note; the tune it is sung to arrived 56 years later. - c. 1826
Oh Shenandoah
A rivermen's song for a Missouri trader's daughter, unprinted until 1876. - 1848
Oh! Susanna
Stephen Foster sold it for a flat fee and watched it become the anthem of the Gold Rush. - 1855
Danny Boy
An Irish air collected in Londonderry, waiting 58 years for an English lawyer to write words to it. - 1861
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Julia Ward Howe wrote it overnight in a Washington hotel, to a tune the soldiers already knew. - c. 1862
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
Composed by Wallace Willis, a freedman in Indian Territory, and carried out by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. - 1873
Home on the Range
A Kansas homesteader's poem, set to music by a neighbour, later fought over in court. - 1879
Red River Valley
Known first as 'The Bright Mohawk Valley' - the red river in question may be Canadian. - 1884
Oh My Darling Clementine
A comic song about a drowning, sung ever since as a nursery rhyme. - 1896
When the Saints Go Marching In
A funeral hymn before it was a jazz standard: slow on the way to the grave, fast on the way back. - 1908
The Streets of Laredo
An Irish ballad about a dying soldier, rewritten on the trail as a cowboy's lament. - 1933
The House of the Rising Sun
Recorded by Clarence Ashley as 'Rising Sun Blues', thirty-one years before the version you know.
Twelve of the nineteen recordings have no written history
The recordings are the easy half. The research — newspaper archives, hymnal scans, working out who sang it first — is what takes the weeks. If you would like to see the next one written, you can put something toward it.