The first draft of my story included the popular folk song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” With Smithland located at the confluence of the Cumberland and Ohio Rivers, it was the perfect location for the great big river to meet the little tiny river. And the story of the old man in Smithland was a perfect match for Jake in my story and the “old man waitin’ for to carry you to freedom” in the song.

Nevertheless, the more research I did, the more I became convinced that the song was not an authentic slave song. In brief, it was first recorded in 1928, after being documented by only one amateur researcher, who claimed to have heard it in three scattered states, even though no one else ever had heard it anywhere. No other “map” songs are known, and this song has far too much information to be safely sung without compromising the safety of fugitives. Furthermore, though slave narratives always speak of the dream of going north and following the North Star, none of the narratives or former slave interviews ever called it a “drinking gourd.” See Bresler for a detailed analysis of the Drinking Gourd song. http://www.followthedrinkinggourd.org/

I chose to use songs published in William Francis Allen’s  1867  collection, Slave Songs of the United States and WEB Du Bois’s book, The Souls of Black Folk.