"Wayfaring Stranger"

As much as Scots-Irish music focuses on loss and parting, it also focuses on homecomings. The ballad “Wayfaring Stranger,” believed to be adapted from the ancient song “The Dowie Dens of Yarrow,” focuses on these themes of homecoming and belonging after a long life of being unsettled and outcasts.

At first the early Scots-Irish immigrants were quickly accepted in America despite their strange clothes and mannerisms. However, as time passed tensions grew between them and their Quaker and German neighbours in Pennsylvania. Because they had already been transplanted twice in living memory and were used to subsistence survival, they moved on and settle lands to the West. For many of them, America truly was the land of the free, and a life for oneself and one’s family was possible. As they moved, they named the places they settled after towns back home.

While they had plenty of songs about their wanderlust, they also had many about home and what it meant to them. Songs like “Blue Ridge Cabin Home,” “Lamplighting Time In the Valley,” “Little Log Cabin In The Lane,” and “Where Is My Father’s Family” are old Scots-Irish songs from the migration that are still sung in Appalachia today and which allude to these dreams of home.