From “Captain Kidd” to Gospel Music

Abstract

The roots of the “Sweet Thing” scheme reach back to sixteenth-century Scotland and England. One of the main branches of this lineage crosses the Atlantic as a penitent broadside ballad castigating Captain William Kidd, a pirate sent to the gallows in London in 1701. Chapter 1 concerns the history of this branch: the long journey of a stanzaic structure from ancient Scottish popular song through English broadside balladry, from the transatlantic broadside “Captain Kidd” through the fervent folk hymnody of the Great Awakening, and from nineteenth-century popular song and urban revivalism to twentieth-century gospel music. Throughout this span, the distinctive rhythmic and textual attributes of the form are apparent in all of the genres that it crosses. In both broadsides and folk hymns we can observe or reconstruct certain melodic characteristics that accompany the form, and in the folk hymns we can also see some general harmonic attributes.