Introduction

Words: Kath­ar­ine E. Pur­vis, in Songs of the Soul No. 2, by James M. Black (Cin­cin­na­ti, Ohio: Cur­tis & Jenn­ings, 1896).

Music: James M. Black (🔊 pdf nwc).

If you know where to get a good pho­to of Purv­is (head-and-shoul­ders, at least 200×300 pix­els), or a bet­ter one of Black, would you ?

The song When the Saints Are March­ing In…is NOT the tra­di­tion­al When the Saints Go March­ing In. Ev­en though the ti­tles dif­fer by a word, sev­er­al au­thor­i­tat­ive mu­sic ref­er­ence books list Pur­vis and Black as the 1896 authors of When the Saints Go March­ing In.

As a con­sequence, ma­ny song col­lec­tions in a va­ri­e­ty of for­mats—book, re­cord, tape and CD—wrong­ly as­sign Kath­ar­ine E. Pur­vis and James M. Black the credit for this Am­er­i­can folk fa­vor­ite.

In truth, the pre­cise or­i­gins of When the Saints Go March­ing In is not known. At this point it is prob­ab­ly not pos­si­ble to trace the orig­in­al source of this er­ror, or to cor­rect it from spread­ing.

Longtime mu­sic pro­fess­or at Ly­coming Col­lege, Ma­ry Lan­don Rus­sell con­fus­es the two songs in her 1957 mas­ters the­sis at Penn State Un­i­ver­si­ty.

The ear­li­est au­thor­i­ta­tive ref­er­ence book with the er­ror ap­pears to be The Great Song The­saur­us by Ro­ger Lax and Fred­er­ick Smith, pub­lished by Ox­ford Un­i­ver­si­ty Press. On page 380 of the 1984 first edi­tion, the au­thors wrong­ly at­trib­ute When the Saints Go March­ing In to Kath­ar­ine E. Pur­vis and James M. Black in 1896.

Loyer, p. 14