My wife's grandmother, Viola Brown, was born in 1904 into a very poor family in rural Mississippi. Those were not good old days if you were poor. Her mother died when she was quite young, and her father, whom she remembers as harsh, handed off the children to relatives and went away to start another life. By the time she was thirty-five or so she had outlived two husbands and had four daughters, the youngest of whom was my wife's mother. This was recorded in 1994, when she was ninety years old. It's one of several made by her daughter Edna (my wife's aunt), and niece Della Faye. With a cassette recorder rolling, they tried to draw her out on the subject of her early life and her family. Frequently she would break into song, as in this one. Edna and Della Faye tried to add harmony here. That's Edna who gets the last verse started.
Those sessions resulted in several tapes which for some months now I've been converting to digital formats. I finally finished this first one–not just the conversion itself, which is pretty simple, but cleaning up the audio and dividing it into meaningful tracks with titles. It was supposed to be a Christmas present for a number of her grandchildren, but better late than never.
This is not pretty singing, and I don't intend to be either sentimental or ironic in posting it. It's the voice of someone whose early life was marked by greater hardship than most of us have experienced, and who was no saint, but who meant what she said when she sang these hymns.
Light On Dark Water 
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