[Dixielandjazz] Elbow Room / Buffum / McGee -- more research

[domitype .]

This was posted on Mudcat, source was the "Carter Family Album" liner notes:

Dave Richoux

Fifty Miles of Elbow Room was written by Herbert Buffum 1879-1939

Af­ter mov­ing with his fam­i­ly to Cal­i­for­nia and be­ing con­vert­ed to
Christ at age 18, Buf­fum felt a call to the min­is­try. He held
min­is­ter­i­al cre­den­tials with the Church of the Nazarene, and was a
ho­li­ness/Pen­te­cost­al evan­gel­ist. He was al­so a prolific song
writ­er, with ma­ny songs in­spired by per­son­al ex­per­i­ence; he had
10,000 songs to his cred­it, 1,000 ac­tu­al­ly pub­lished. Ripley's
"Believe It or Not" claimed he once wrote 12 songs in an hour. Though a
tal­ent­ed mu­si­cian, Buf­fum re­ceived no mu­sic­al train­ing. He sold
most of his songs for five dollars or less. When he died, the Los Angeles
Times called him "The King of Gos­pel Song Writ­ers."


A classic version is the 1930 recording by Reverend F. W. McGee, Anthology
of American Folk Music, Smithsonian/Folkways SFW 40090, CD( (1997), trk# 55
[1930/06/16]

FIFTY MILES OF ELBOW ROOM Carter Family

          Twelve thousand miles its length and breadth
          The foursquare city stands
          Its gemset walls of jasper shine
          Not made by human hands
          100 miles its gates are wide
          Abundant entrance there
          With fifty miles of elbow room
          On either side to spare

               When the gates swing wide on the other side
               Just beyond the sunset sea
               There'll be room to spare as we enter there
               Room for you and room for me
               For the gates are wide on the other side
               Where the flowers ever bloom
               On the right hand, on the left hand
               Fifty miles of elbow room

          Sometimes I'm cramped and crowded here
          And long for elbow room
          I want to reach for altitude
          Where the fairest flowers bloom
          It won't be long before I pass
          Into that city fair
          With fifty miles of elbow room
          On either side to spare

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Dick Baker <djml at dickbaker.org> wrote:

> Well, this is right up my Stomp Off index alley, although the song has
> never shown up on Stomp Off, rather surprisingly.
>
> I rechecked Bill's search for Herbert Buffum copyrights quite thoroughly.
> He first shows up in 1910, but doesn't really hit his stride until the
> mid-1920s, when he starts pumping the gospel organ prodigiously.  But
> nothing about Elbow Room--maybe (see below).
>
> F. W. McGee, as Bill reported, had the song copyrighted in his name by
> Southern Music Co. in September 1933; I also found that McGee personally
> renewed that copyright in September 1960.
>
> But one thing is slightly intriguing:  In 1924 Herbert Buffum copyrighted
> a hymn titled "There'll Be Room Enough in Heaven," which is the underlying
> theme of Elbow Room.
>
>         When the gates swing wide on the other side
>         Just beyond the sunset sea
>         There'll be room to spare as we enter there
>         Room for you and room for me
>         For the gates are wide on the other side
>         Where the flowers ever bloom
>         On the right hand, on the left hand
>         Fifty miles of elbow room
>
> But I suspect that the roominess of Heaven is a pretty common theme in the
> gospel world.
>
> It would be darned interesting, though, to find the lyrics to Buffum's
> song to see if they're anything like the ones that McGee sang and
> copyrighted.
>
> And guess what?  Not only was Buffum's song published as a single sheet,
> there's a copy of it for sale on amazon.com:
>
>         http://www.amazon.com/Therell-Be-Room-Enough-Heaven/dp/B003Q1VD92
>
> I was a little surprised that I couldn't find Buffum's lyrics elsewhere;
> perhaps somebody else with heightened Google skills could take up the
> chase.  Or just go by the darned thing from Amazon!
>
>
>
>
>
> --Dick Baker
> Still at work on the Stomp Off Records Tune Titles and Composers Index
> See http://stompoff.dickbaker.org/
>
>
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