Moonlight
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 30/07/2020

Day 136 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "The verse above is one of several in the popular song of many years ago, Meet Me by Moonlight. As it reached the Tennessee and Kentucky mountains and lived on there, the mountain  people made adaptations till they had changed it into their own song and something else again. . . .

"The mountain lyrists who composed the verses to "Moonlight," as here given, eventually won an immense audience; desperate opera stars, hunting a composition that had a sure hold on American  heart strings, put on its modern derivative, The Prisoner's Song, in their "popular performances,"  as the phrase goes. . . .

"The tune here is from Gilbert R. Combs and the text includes verses from  Combs and from Mary Leaphart. ... In singing the refrain may or may not be used with all stanzas."