A Prairie Girl's Faith by Stephen W. Hines

Author:Stephen W. Hines
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Songs in the Night

I picked a wild sunflower, and as I looked into its golden heart, such a wave of homesickness came over me that I almost wept. I wanted Mother, with her gentle voice and quiet firmness; I longed to hear Father’s jolly songs and to see his twinkling blue eyes.

—LAURA INGALLS WILDER

We know that when Pa’s fiddle sang it played many tunes of gaiety and good cheer to the little family on the prairie. Family singing was popular in the days before electricity made entertainment available at the push of a button. Humorous tunes such as “The Arkansas Traveler,” “Captain Jinks,” and “Oh! Susanna” were very familiar to the Ingallses through Pa’s one-man musical band. The family’s song collection contained an extensive number of tunes for mere enjoyment.

Yet undoubtedly the most impactful songs in Pa’s repertoire were the many hymns that the family—including Laura—sang together. In the Little House series, Laura made it clear the many fun and entertaining songs the family sang were not sufficient to sustain the family through rugged days of prairie living, particularly during a hard winter. The little family needed stronger stuff than mere melody to keep hope and faith alive as tough times kept coming the farther west they moved.

The fact is, Laura referred time and again to the many hymns and sacred songs that Pa played to strengthen the family in their various little homes. I count approximately thirty hymns that are either from hymnbooks or from what they’d learned from memory, lacking those books because of their cost. Even patriotic standards could be made into hymns to teach civic virtue, such as “Hail, Columbia” by Joseph Hopkinson:

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