Follow the Drinking Gourd

The drinking gourd is the Big Dipper. Dried bottle gourds were hollowed out and used as water dippers all over rural nineteenth-century America, and the Dipper's seven bright stars make the same shape, bowl and handle. The two stars on the outer edge of the bowl point almost straight at Polaris, the North Star.

Every version of this song sung today traces back to one source: an article by H. B. Parks printed in 1928 in Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Number VII. The words above are Parks's text in his own spelling. They are not the words most people know, which come from a 1947 rewrite.

Origins

Harris Braley Parks (1879 to 1958) was a Texas entomologist and amateur folklorist. He reported hearing pieces of the song three times, at Hot Springs, North Carolina in 1912, at Louisville in 1913, and at Waller, Texas in 1918. All of his informants were Black, and a fourth man in Texas explained to him what the words meant. Parks noted a second chorus he heard in Waller: "Foller the Risen Lawd."

The article supplies the famous story along with the song. Parks wrote that an Underground Railroad operative called Peg Leg Joe moved between plantations north of Mobile, Alabama, posing as a journeyman laborer while teaching the song and marking the route on trees "with charcoal or mud of the outline of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot."

The song then spread mostly through print. It was reprinted in a Lomax songbook in 1934, and in 1947 Lee Hays of the Weavers published a reworked arrangement in the People's Songs Bulletin. Hays smoothed out the dialect and added the line about an old man waiting to carry you to freedom, and that is the version schools and choirs sing.

Meaning & Interpretation

Read the way Parks's informant explained it, the verses lay out a walking route. It starts near Mobile in spring, when the sun climbs higher and the first quail call. The traveller follows the Tombigbee River upstream, past trees marked with a left foot and a peg, to where its headwaters end between hills in northeastern Mississippi. Beyond them runs another river, the Tennessee, followed down to Paducah, Kentucky, where it meets the Ohio. The "ole man" is the guide waiting at the crossing.

The reading holds together. It also comes from the same 1928 article as the words, which is the whole difficulty.

What is the drinking gourd?

The Big Dipper. A drinking gourd was a common household object, a hollowed and dried gourd used to scoop water, and the star group looks like one. Because the Dipper's pointer stars line up with Polaris, anyone who could find it could find north without a compass. That part of the song needs no code to explain it.

Was Follow the Drinking Gourd really a secret map?

There is no documentation that it was. No mention of the song, or of Peg Leg Joe, has been found anywhere before Parks's 1928 article, and the song has never been collected in Alabama, where the route is supposed to begin, despite heavy collecting there. James Kelley, writing in The Journal of Popular Culture in 2008, argued that the coded-message claim rests on no credible evidence. Researcher Joel Bresler, who assembled the fullest history of the song, points out that Parks said a great-uncle confirmed the story, but that great-uncle, Dr. Harris Cowdry, died in 1875, four years before Parks was born. Historians add that a fixed, singable route runs against how the Underground Railroad actually worked, in small unconnected cells that improvised. The Underground Railroad is documented history and the song is real folk material. The link between the two rests on one account, told once, never corroborated.

Why are there so many different versions of the lyrics?

Because singers kept reshaping it. Parks's 1928 dialect text, the Hays arrangement of 1947, a version Randy Sparks heard from the street singer John Woodum in Shreveport in 1955, and the expanded verses written for modern picture books all differ from each other. The Woodum version carries no geography at all. The text on this page is Parks's, the earliest one on record.