"Behold, a lovely vine"

"Lovely Vine," from Jeremiah Ingalls' Christian Harmony, 1805

Now that I have retired and moved back to my native New England I find that what had always been a decidedly, if not deliberately, latent interest in the music of the early New England psalmodists, has risen more to the fore in my mind. It's not that I had no curiosity about the music of William Billings, Justin Morgan, Daniel Read, Supply Belcher, and their numerous contemporaries--far from it, in fact--but it was an interest that always bubbled under the surface as I pursued topics of greater intellectual and musical priority to me personally. One reason for my relative disinterest was the fact that the music of the "First New England School" of American composers has been well-mined by American musicologists. It was one of the principal areas of American music that received serious attention from the dedicated cadre of renegade musicologists who fought to have American topics accepted by the academy at a time when "musicology" meant only the study of the music of European composers.

By the time I became a serious player in the world of American music studies in the 1980s, however, the field had grown enough that work on Billings, et al., was becoming unfashionable. My contemporaries and I waged our own battles to burst the doors open further for scholarship in folk music, country music, African American music, music by female composers, and 20th century topics in general. Including--gasp!--rock 'n' roll! I had no desire to pursue research in a field that had been so thoroughly, and ably, plowed by others.

From my current position on the sidelines of the academic world, and living back in the world of small(-ish) town New England in which I was raised (albeit in a different state), my priorities have shifted. If I may be permitted a god-awful cliche, I've been re-connecting with my roots--and very much enjoying doing so. This re-connecting has proceeded along a couple of lines.

The first has been engaging in a good deal of serious reflection about my formative years on the family farm in western Massachusetts, as can be seen in some of the other posts in this blog. Beyond simply re-visiting memories from earlier times and indulging in self-centered nostalgia, I have been striving to get a better understanding of the cultural and historical context of the rural New England life that is my family's heritage. The fact that it is a way of life that has all but disappeared has no doubt contributed to my interest in exploring it.

The second has been strengthening and expanding my long-standing interest in music of the region. The study of New England fiddle music has been the biggest part of this interest, and the one that has largely defined my academic identity. Living in the area again has inspired me to pick up where I left off in the realm of fiddle research and scholarship more than 30 years ago. As a player I have regained much of the repertoire of Yankee and Franco-American tunes that I had in the 1970s but which had lain fallow during the many years I lived in California and Tennessee. My wife and I also co-host a weekly radio show devoted to traditional music of New England and Atlantic Canada.

But in addition to fiddle music, I now find myself quite happily delving into the world of the music of the New England psalmodists of the late 18th and early 19th century, the music that previously I had so consciously skirted. My academic explorations have been enhanced greatly by having an opportunity to bring some of this music to life in performance via involvement in the music program of our local village church.

It is a serendipitous treat when my explorations and ruminations along these two paths converge, when the realm of agrarian life of an earlier time becomes manifest in some fashion in the world of early New England sacred music. Which brings me to the real subject of this post.

One major source of guidance into the world of early New England psalmody has been recordings and live performances by various artists, principally the Boston Camerata. Their recording of "Lovely Vine," Vermont psalmodist Jeremiah Ingalls' setting of a text by Joshua Smith, published in Ingalls' Christian Harmony in 1805, has long been a favorite. 

Apart from the fact that "Lovely Vine" has a melody that is, well, lovely, a big reason for its appeal to me personally is the imagery of grapes on the vine, and the thoughts this evokes of my own upbringing. On the farm where I was raised there is a very old Concord grape vine. Just how old, I don't know, but it has been there for as long as I have been alive, and I have reason to believe that it pre-dates my father's birth in 1911. I wrote a bit about the vine a couple of years back in a post about the local agricultural fair, and the produce that my grandfather exhibited there (which included Concord grapes) around the time my father was born. In that earlier post I mentioned the fond memories I have of enjoying the products of that vine on many a late summer or early autumn day.

A few years back, in 2016 I think, I obtained a bit of root stock of the old vine, courtesy of my cousins who now own the family place. I planted it in our yard in Maine where it survived, but did not exactly thrive...until last year when the aforementioned cousin came and built an arbor for it. Since then it has done remarkably well -- see photo below!

 

By late September--voila!--nice, fat, juicy, sweet Concords, ready to eat! When I bit down on the first one I was immediately hit with a flood of memories of eating them as a kid. (We only got to enjoy about half the crop before some critters--raccoons, I suspect--helped themselves to the rest, but that's another story.) 

As I write in mid-July 2020, the vines are again flourishing in their second year on the arbor. There are green grapes a-plenty; bunches of bunches, as it were. Every time I walk past the arbor the sight calls forth Ingalls' tune and Smith's poetry: 

Behold a lovely vine, here in this desert ground,

The blossoms shoot, and promise fruit,

And tender grapes are found.

This coming together of two aspects of my New England heritage, music and agriculture, is immensely gratifying. 

The grape vine is just one of the bits of the family farm that I have brought with me to my home in southern Maine. I still own the small lot on the farm where the sugarhouse once stood and have used that as the source of most of what I have transported here. Six young sugar maples from that lot now line one side of our driveway. A few years back I disassembled a rather nondescript shed that had served variously as sleeping quarters for hired hands in years past, as a chicken house, and as an ad hoc storage building. I've re-purposed materials from that project in numerous ways: exterior boards became siding for a new garden shed; the heavy beams of the frame now serve as edging for our vegetable garden; some stones from the foundation went into a border for a new flower garden; others were used to make a patio in front of the new shed; and the 3" x 5" timbers from inside the walls work perfectly as the frame of the grape arbor. 

All of these things are important for their value in connecting me not only to my own past, but also to the deeper culture and heritage of my family and region. Yet, it is perhaps the grapevine that provides the strongest link from the past to the present. The fact that it is a scion of the same vine that has produced fruit that has been enjoyed by six generations of my family is pretty impressive. It is, indeed, a "lovely vine," eminently worthy of being celebrated in song.

One can easily point to other pieces from the early New England sacred repertoire that employ agrarian motifs. "Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree," another personal favorite is, not surprisingly, again the work of Jeremiah Ingalls--though he was just one of several composers who have done settings of a text written by Richard Hutchins. The Shaker song, "O, We Have a Lovely Vine," seems to be an adaptation of Smith's poetry, if not Ingalls' music. (See Patterson, p. 205) Harvest metaphors, and imagery of trees, birds, and farm animals abound. These all speak to the close ties between the corporeal and spiritual realms that formed the backbone of the world view of early Yankee farmers. They had to believe that with enough hard labor on their part, and perhaps a bit of Divine assistance, the earth would provide.

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Postscript: Concord grapes are themselves a product of New England's agrarian heritage. Their story begins in the town in eastern Massachusetts whose name they bear. They were developed by a man named Ephraim Wales Bull (1806-1895). Bull was born in Boston and moved the 20 or so miles west to Concord in 1836. Concord was at this time a thriving center of literary and intellectual activity; Bull could count Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcott Family, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among his neighbors. Prior to moving to Concord, Bull had made his living as a "goldbeater"--making gold leaf--but in his new home he developed a passion for horticulture. He set about to breed a variety of grape that would be suitable both for fresh eating and for making wine, and that would be hardy enough to survive a New England winter. He began working with a native wild grape (probably fox grapes) that possessed some of the characteristics of sweetness and hardiness that he found desirable. After several years of experimentation he introduced his new variety at the 1853 meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. It became widely popular, but Bull profited little from his invention. The marker on his grave in Concord carries the wistful epitaph: "He sowed, others reaped." 

New England Historical Society

Post-postscript: Lending credence to my belief that the vine from which my cutting was derived is well over a century old, is the fact that Bull's original vine is said to still be growing at his home in Concord. There's a better-than-even chance that Bull himself was still alive when whatever level of great-ancestor it was who planted "our" vine did so. I suppose it is even within the realm of possibility that the vine was there when my great-grandfather, Alexius Wells, bought the farm in 1864, and that its presence is due to the fact that someone responded to an ad like this one from 1859, touting Concord grapes as the latest and greatest. (Click on the image for a larger copy.)

Sources: 

Long article on Bull in Arnoldia, the quarterly magazine of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. 

New England Historical Society article on Bull. 

Daniel Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual, Princeton Univ. Press, 1979.

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"Lovely Vine" transcribed into modern notation, with simple piano accompaniment added (click on the image for larger copy: