[Music]
When Gabriel's awful trump shall sound,
And rend the rocks, convulse the ground
And give to time her utmost bound,
Ye dead arise to judgment.
See lightnings flash and thunders roll;
See earth wrapt up like parchment scroll,
Comets blaze, sinners raise,
Dread amaze, horrors seize
The guilty sons of Adam's race,
Unsav'd from sin by Jesus.
The Christian, fill'd with rapturous joy,
Midst flaming worlds he mounts on high,
To meet his Savior in the sky
And see the face of Jesus.
The soul and body reunite,
And fill with glory infinite.
Blessed day, Christians say,
Will you pray that we may
All join that happy company
To praise the name of Jesus.
The compiler of the _Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony_ attributed
the song to "Bradshaw". I find distinct ancestral traces of its tune
in 'Princess Royal' given in a number of traditional forms as a morris
dance tune in Sharp, _The Morris Dance Book_. Assuming these to be the
oldest forms of the tune, the next younger form seems to have been
what was called in Walsh's _Compleat Dancing Master_ (_ca._ 1730),
"The Princess Royal, the new way". In 1796 Shield adapted the air to
the words of 'The Saucy Arethusa' in the ballad opera _The Lock and
Key_. It may be found entitled 'The Arethusa' in _The English Musical
Repository_, p. 32. At about the same time--around the end of the
eighteenth century--the tune was used also for 'Bold Nelson's Praise'
a version of which was recently recorded by Sharp, _One Hundred
English Folk-Songs_, No. 88. The as yet unidentified "Bradshaw" seems
to have taken one of these late-eighteenth-century tunes--probably
'Arethusa'--as his model when he made the 'Mississippi' song as it
appeared in the _Supplement to the Kentucky Harmony_ in 1820.
No. 100
PLEADING SAVIOR, OSH 234