The song was first recorded/collected by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1937 as sung by G. D. Vowell, under the title "Bright Moving Stars are Rising".
The songs are performed from a book of the same name, published by their mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, (Doubleday & Co., 1953).
The book cites the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress, with the identifier "1379 A1.
"[2] …the words of this song are typical of the shape-note hymn, especially in the apostrophe of the ancestors (father, mother, and so forth), but the original singer probably delivered his own particular version which throws the ordinary strict-tempo melody into an alternation of 5/4 – 4/4 – 3/4 measures.
(from the Archive of American Folksong in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)[3]References to the Morning Star were common in the 19th century, as can be seen in Edward Billups's 1854 book The Sweet Songster,[4] a Baptist hymnal from Kentucky.