When the Curtains of Night are Pinned Back
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-08-25

Day 162 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

This begins the "Great Open Spaces".

Sandburg writes: "The cowboys of Colorado took a garrulous popular song of the 1870's (I'll Remember You, Love, in my Prayers"), and kept a fragment, the heart's essence of it.

It is impressive when sung by a lone horseman silhouetted against a distant horizon. Given any where with ease, feeling, control, it may leave echoes as thin and air- hung as certain apparitions of a clear night's sky of stars. That is, it holds an honest and independent poetry. . . .

Text and tune are from Jane Ogle of Rock Island, Illinois." 

NOTES from the Traditional Ballad Index: Hazel Felleman's 1936 book The Best Loved Poems of the American People, p. 32, has a long version of this with the title "I'll Remember You, Love, in My Prayers." That version looks very composed, but she lists no author. It appears, however, that the original was by the well-known composer Will S. Hays. The first sheet music printing was apparently titled "I'll Remember You [Love] in my prayers. - RBW