She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain

White horses used in religion and mythology as symbols of travel through the afterlife.

Remember those old songs you sang as a child?  There is a reason these songs lasted over centuries.  It's because they deal with familiar themes or with ideas that stay with us lifelong, like the notion of arriving anywhere with a flourish, "riding six white horses."  And what if you could hear it rock?

We tend to sing those old songs only as they were written, as if the familiar might pass if we changed one bit of a verse or melody.  But songs like "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain were often changed several times, and continue to be, as singers and writers fuse their own style onto the words and music of another, so long as they are past those copyright laws, however.

This song, while it appears to be someone waiting for a friend to arrive at a train station, has that sound of travel and moving on, but it is a symbolic one.  It is a spiritual, the relating of the old story of traveling to heaven.  Heaven is that place where people celebrate when you arrive, the song presumes; and that's why there are "six white horses," the symbol of purity, speed and flight of a different sort.  That same symbol is used in other old songs like St. James Infirmary where again the six white horses are taking the soul to heaven.

Enjoy this rendition with the joy of life and faith as those who sang it over centuries,, with this revised and rollicking and rolling version of She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain..