Good Shepherd

"Good Shepherd" is a traditional song, best known as recorded by Jefferson Airplane on their 1969 album Volunteers. It was arranged and sung by the group's lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen, who described their interpretation of it as psychedelic folk-rock. Called by nearly a dozen different names and with varying words, melodies and purpose but common themes, the song's history reflects many of the evolutionary changes and cross-currents of American music. It begins early in the 19th century with a backwoods preacher who wrote hymns, persists through that century, manifests itself in a 1930s gospel blues recording done in a prison by a blind inmate convicted of murder, and sees use in the 1950s as a folk song, before attaining its realization by Jefferson Airplane. Several of these different variants of the song are still performed in the 21st century. Hymn "Good Shepherd" originated in a very early 19th century hymn written by the Methodist minister Reverend John Adam Granade (1770–1807), "Let Thy Kingdom, Blessed Savior". Granade was a significant figure of the Great Revival in the American West during the 19th century's first decade, as the most important author of camp meeting hymns during that time. He was referred to by the Nashville Banner as the "wild man of Goose Creek", and was also variously known as "the poet of the backwoods" and "the Wild Man of Holston". Granade worked in part in the world of shape-note singing in the Shenandoah Valley, where a variety of musical sources both sacred and profane were at play. This new hymn had an immediate effect. A Thomas Griffin recalls hearing it in a Methodist meeting in Oglethorpe, Georgia in 1808. He wrote that the singing of the hymn "made the flesh tremble on me, and caused an awful sense of the hereafter to press on my mind"; he converted to Christianity a few days later. Granade's work can be seen in the 1817 hymnal A Selection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Two Parts as "Come good shepherd, feed thy Sheep", while the first line of the hymn also makes an appearance in one Eleazer Sherman's 1832 memoir.