Notes: Follow the Drinking Gourd was first collected by H. B. Parks, an entomologist and amateur folklorist, in the 1910s. Parks reported that Peg Leg Joe, an operative of the Underground Railroad, had passed as a laborer and spread the song to different plantations, giving directions for slaves to escape. The song was published by the Texas Folklore Society in 1928. The song is supposed to be a code and a memory aid: it says to begin the journey at the time of year when the sun begins to rise higher in the sky each day and when the quail - a migratory bird that winters in the south - is heard. Experience has shown that this will most likely bring them to the Ohio River nearly a year later when it is frozen and can be walked across. To get to the Ohio River they must follow the Tom Bigbee river north to its headwaters, cross the hills and continue north up the Tennessee River, to where it empties into the Ohio. Peg-Leg Joe - the old man - will be waiting there to escort them for the remainder of the trip. Along the river bank there are dead trees marked with the sign of a foot print and a peg leg; and overhead in the sky the big dipper, or the drinking gourd, keeps them always headed north. The song came to be popularized as a wonderful song ?Follow the Drinkin Gourd? and I?ll follow that with a song of another hero of the underground railroad, Harriet Tubman.
