This write-up can be very short because I already told you most of the story a week ago on December 1. This is the field recording of Vera Hall’s Sunday School lesson that Alan Lomax made when he re-visited her in 1959. Vera was a lifetime Sunday School teacher. This was recorded in October so she re-enacted her Christmas lesson for him which includes two songs. One is a Christmas version of January, February (Last Month of the Year) and it is this variant that has become one of the favourite Christmas songs in folk music circles.
The other song is No Room at the Inn, which is not often covered in Christmas albums. It is not in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1953 American Folk Songs for Christmas. It would have been a perfect fit for that songbook so I presume that it had not been previously collected at that time. It is not clear from the sources I have read whether either of these songs were introduced to Lomax as being old songs, or as ones that she wrote herself. As part of my time-management good intentions I am not going to chase down that rabbit hole now.
Nor will I tell you more about Vera Ward Hall although she was a fascinating person. If you want to learn more about her you could begin with her Wikipedia entry, this entry from the Encyclopedia of Alabama, or this article from the Association for Cultural Equity founded by Alan Lomax. But perhaps the best insight into what kind of person Vera Hall was comes from listening to the spoken part in the middle of this Sunday School lesson.
I got this recording from the Rounder Records CD Songs of Christmas from the Alan Lomax Collection. According to its liner notes for this track:
Many churches hold special services so that the nativity and its meaning can be explored in terms readily understood by children. This is the imaginative retelling of the nativity that Vera Ward Hall presented to her Livingston, Alabama Sunday school classes for many years. In Vera Ward Hall’s extraordinary performance the details of the Holy Family’s travails parallel the hardships endured by blacks in her rural Alabama community and throughout the country. She dwells on the poverty and exclusion that attended Christ’s birth …
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