"Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is an American folk song first published in 1928. The Drinking Gourd is another name for the Big Dipper asterism. Folklore has it that fugitive slaves in the United States used it as a point of reference so they would not get lost. According to legend, the song was used by a conductor of the Underground Railroad, called Peg Leg Joe, to guide some fugitive slaves. While the song may possibly refer to some lost fragment of history, the origin and context remain a mystery. A more recent source challenges the authenticity of the claim that the song was used to help slaves escape to the North and to freedom.
Two of the stars in the Big Dipper line up very closely with and point to Polaris. Polaris is a circumpolar star, and so it is always seen nearly exactly in the direction of true north. Hence, according to a popular myth, all slaves had to do was look for the Drinking Gourd and follow it to the North Star (Polaris) north to freedom.
Famous quotes containing the words follow the, follow and/or gourd:
“To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“I think that parents ought to get some idea of how the so- called “experts” have changed their advice over the decades, so that they won’t take them deadly seriously, and so that if the parent has the strong feeling, “I don’t like this advice,” the parent won’t feel compelled to follow it. . . . So don’t worry about trying to do a perfect job. There is no perfect job. There is no one way of raising your children.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the gourd from which I drink in long draughts the wine of memory?”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)