He felt a
little like he was staring through prison bars, as he slowly made his way
through the cotton field. That’s what Albert Edward Brumley thought about in
his early 20s as he mulled over his future. How could he make music his life’s
work, in contrast to field labor? He probably never imagined that the first
time “I’ll Fly Away” crept into his consciousness in the mid-1920s, it would be
after he’d already given up (temporarily) on music school. He was picking
cotton one day in Oklahoma (perhaps not too unlike the one shown here in 1897),
but music still occupied his thoughts. In fact, it was another song that day in
the field that gave him the spark for his own composition, though the fruition
of “I’ll Fly Away” would take several years after its initial conception.
Albert had
tried music school as a 19-year old, but having suspended that venture, he was
engaged in something in the following year that he must have thought was pretty
far-removed from making music, but which one might say altered the course of
his life. He was harvesting cotton for his father and helping the family make a
living, but the song that was stuck in his head indicates how he really felt
about life – his future – at that moment. He admits he was humming something
called “The Prisoner’s Song”, a popular song of the era, sung to give voice to
the thoughts of fictional inmates who obviously wanted to be elsewhere. Birds
were some of his companions in the cotton field, and Albert imagined being one
of them, flying away from the tedium like a fleeing prisoner. The young Brumley
evidently soon thereafter returned to music school, but the song he thought about
under the sun in the cotton field continued to inhabit his thoughts for the
next several years. By the early 1930s, “I’ll Fly Away” was finally in print as
a result of Albert’s perseverance. One could speculate that Albert did in fact
make his prison-break successfully over the following decades. “I’ll Fly Away”
was just one of the several hundred songs (reportedly between 600 and 800 over
his lifetime) that he wrote. Albert also worked for or owned music publishing
companies, while also teaching others in singing schools in the Arkansas and
Missouri Ozarks, and in his native Oklahoma. This ‘fleeing prisoner’ (see verse
2 of ‘I’ll Fly Away’) was eventually honored as an inductee into three halls of
fame in the last decade of his life. Albert’s songs included those written on
either side of his cotton field experience, but probably none have been more
well-known than “I’ll Fly Away”.
Despite
how one’s life goes, there are eventually days that make one feel as Albert did
in the cotton field. The feeling can be induced from either end of the spectrum
– poverty or wealth, fame or insignificance. Am I ‘trapped’ in financial
straits, or a dull existence? Or, am I hostage to my profit margin, and to the
people my affluence supports? Or, as I age, do my own body’s imperfections hem
me into an inevitable conclusion? Entrapment is really a state of mind, someone
says. If you said that to Albert, he might have said ‘Right!’, for to him, imprisonment
was temporary. Albert just seemed to know his prison warden offers a pardon.
Does yours?
One source
for information on the song discussed above is The Complete Book of
Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J.
Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006.
See
biography on composer in Our Garden of Song, edited by Gene C. Finley,
Howard Publishing Company, West Monroe, Louisiana, 1980.
History
of the song is also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Fly_Away
The other
song that helped spur the composer’s own song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner%27s_Song
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