Even the later date of 1902 is remarkable when one considers the advanced style of this song. If, as it appears, it is a reworking of a lost anthem Ives wrote for a church in 1898, it is astonishing.

The text is by Ives, and is a tribute to the joys of walking. The song is a miniature tone poem. "On a big October morning," at which time New England would be vibrant with autumn colors, Ives momentarily stops his "walking towards the future" because he has noticed some sounds.—a funeral in a church down the valley, and a dance at a roadhouse down the valley. Then Ives resumes walking: "Today we do not choose to die or to dance, but to live and walk."

This is a rare Ives song in a fast tempo throughout. This and the steadiness of the rhythms keeps the music from being especially reminiscent of Debussy, despite its consistent use of parallel fifths.

The opening measures have parallel tritones (diminished fifths) in the right hand. Then, as the walking rhythm picks up in a steady bass pattern, the sonorities in the right hand part are parallel fifths, another forbidden effect by standard rules, though one that Debussy had been prominently breaking for a few years by then.

(In music the terms parallel intervals are musical lines moving in the same direction the same distance apart. Standard rules said thirds, fourths, and sixths in parallel were O.K. but not tritones or fifths.)

Ives' parallel fifths are even more daring than Debussy's, for he stacks two parallel fifths on top of each other: For instance, a chord of G-D-B-F# is followed by F#-C#-A-E, then A-B-G-D.

When the walking pauses Ives softens the walking rhythm by moving it halfway off the beat and slows the tempo for the funeral, and for the dance he perks it up by use of a ragtime rhythm, one of the first appearances of that popular music idiom in any "classical" piece in the European tradition. In the end the song fades as the walking rhythm holds on a final chord.

Walking played an important part in bringing Ives to the world's attention. After composer Aaron Copland established his own music festival at Yaddo (an artists' colony located next to the racetrack at Saratoga), he scheduled six of Ives' 114 Songs, including Walking in the festival. The May 1, 1932, performance with Copland accompanying Hubert Linscott was well-received, and critics began praising Ives. The Boston Transcript said that "nothing heard at the festival showed higher imaginative power" than this group of songs, and Trend magazine called Ives "surely one of our significant musical figures."

Walking was also on the bill at John Kirkpatrick's historic all-Ives recital at New York's Town Hall in February 1939, during which the pianist and pioneer Ives interpreter repeated his triumphant performance of the "Concord" Piano Sonata and added a group of songs sung by soprano Mina Hager.

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