"Bright Morning Star" is a traditional Appalachian spiritual, that has been sung by numerous folk artists, and was popularized in the folk revivals of the 1960s and 70s, particularly by The Young Tradition.
The song was first recorded/collected by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1937 as sung by G. D. Vowell, under the title "Bright Moving Stars are Rising".[1]
Peggy Seeger, with her sisters Penny & Barbara included the song on their 1957 album, American Folk Songs for Christmas, on Scholastic Records SC 7553.
…the words of this song are typical of the shape-note hymn, especially in the apostrophe of the ancestors (father, mother, and so forth), but the original singer probably delivered his own particular version which throws the ordinary strict-tempo melody into an alternation of 5/4 – 4/4 – 3/4 measures. (from the Archive of American Folksong in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)[3]
References to the Morning Star were common in the 19th century, as can be seen in Edward Billups's 1854 book The Sweet Songster,[4] a Baptist hymnal from Kentucky.
"Bright Morning Star". The Longest Song. Retrieved 2021-12-31. This article incorporates text from this source, which is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
