Fault Is in Me

DESCRIPTION: In every verse "Jonah cried out, "O Lord, The fault's in me." Jonah is sent because "The people in the church They didn't do right." Jonah went to sea, was cast overboard, and swallowed by a whale that spewed him out on Ninevah shore.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1931 (Hutson/Pinckney/Rutledge-SomeSongsTheNegroSang)
KEYWORDS: travel sea ship shore religious whale
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Hutson/Pinckney/Rutledge-SomeSongsTheNegroSang, pp. 294-295, "Fault Een Me" (1 text, 1 tune)
NOTES [156 words]: The description follows Hutson/Pinckney/Rutledge-SomeSongsTheNegroSang but I do not repeat the dialect. - BS
For Jonah and the fish that was emphatically not a whale, see the notes to "God's Radiophone." That's hardly the biggest error in this piece, though; Jonah is sent to Nineveh (Jonah 1:2), not Jews or Christians, and the people of Nineveh would not be in churches. And while Jonah admits to his shipmates that the storm that threatens them is because of him (Jonah 1:12), he does not admit it to God -- he spends most of the book arguing with God that he (Jonah) is right and God is doing the wrong thing (see, e.g., Jonah 4:9, where Jonah has a hissy fit because God was making a point about how cranky Jonah was). The word "fault" never even occurs in the King James Version text of Jonah. It seems pretty clear that the author of this song had heard about the story of Jonah but did not have access to the Biblical text. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.1
File: HPR294F

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