“Follow the Drinking Gourd” is a African American folk song that describes a route to freedom in the north for escaping enslaved people in the antebellum south. The most common modern version describes a path to be taken in spring (“When the sun comes back / and the first quail calls”) led by an old man with a peg leg (possibly a former sailor) using a river as a road to disguise their travels.18 The phrase “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is repeated in the verses and the chorus and refers to the constellation Ursa Major, also known as the Big Dipper. This constellation is fairly easy to find, and points toward Polaris, the North Star; if one walks towards Polaris, one will be heading north.
There are some logical inconsistencies in the modern version of this song. First, the modern lyrics were written in 1947 by Lee Hays and were unlikely to be the actual lyrics used by escaping slaves, assuming the song itself predates the Civil War. Second, in the Deep South, slaves often escaped to the West and south to Mexico, not to the North. Escaping to the North was popular in border states. Additionally, the modern lyrics are both too vague (“The dead trees show the way / … The river ends between two hills”)19 and references to a specific “ole man”20 waiting for the escaped enslaved people is unlikely. Thirdly, scholarly documentation about pre-1947 versions often include the disclaimer that there were more verses, but the person being interviewed does not remember them.21 However, as folklore does not need to be historically accurate to contain cultural knowledge, these historicity issues do not take away from the cultural importance of the song.
