Tonight, an old song. Which probably means nothing to you, but it means something to me, and there’s a story or two in there, and stories are good things.

If there was an artistic side to my family, it was my paternal grandmother’s. Her father was a skilled artisan, with (I’m told) beautiful handwriting. Grandma sang and played the piano and guitar – I don’t think she was anything like a virtuoso, but she could sight-read, something I never achieved.

Sometimes she’d sit at the piano and play for her own amusement, and her favorite song seemed to be “Nelly Gray” (video above), a very popular pre-Civil War anti-slavery ballad. I have no idea where she learned it. Maybe her piano teacher made her memorize it. Maybe it was popular in her family – her own parents came to America in the 1880s, long after abolition had been accomplished, but she had cousins who came in the 1840s.

“Nelly Gray” was written by a United Brethren minister and songwriter named Benjamin Hanby (who also wrote the Christmas songs “Up on the Housetop” and “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas”).

Like all the United Brethren, Hanby was a strong abolitionist. His family had given shelter to an escaped slave named Joseph Selby, who had left his sweetheart behind in Kentucky. The family was trying to raise money to buy her freedom when Selby died of pneumonia. Deeply moved, Benjamin Hanby created the song “Nelly Gray” (published 1856) about a slave in Kentucky whose sweetheart has been “sold down the river” to Georgia (generally considered a crueler place for bondsmen than Kentucky). He laments her loss, and at the end of the song he is dying, looking forward to their reunion in Heaven.