Burl Ives - Wayfaring Stranger (American spiritual / folk song)

Folk singer Burl Ives sings the American spiritual / folk song, “The Wayfaring Stranger.“ The evidence of the origins of “The Wayfaring Stranger“ is unclear. Musicologists in particular have disputed whether the song was originally a white or black spiritual. For example, George Pullen Jackson claimed that the song had its origins among the white mountain folk of Appalachia (White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes“. University of North Carolina Press, 1933). Some more recent musicologists have disputed this claim, suggesting that its origins rested in the enslaved African-American community potentially as far back as the colonial period. Professor David Warren Steel criticizes some proponents of this view in his book review, “Folk Songs of the Catskills: A Review,“ Journal of Musicological Research 5 (November 1984), pp. 260-264: “The authors, like other critics of George Pullen Jack