When Israel was in Egypt’s land
Let my people go
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
Let my people go

Go down Moses
Way down in Egypt land
Tell old Pharaoh
“Let my people go”

“Thus spoke the Lord” bold Moses said
Let my people go
“If not I’ll smite your first born dead
Let my people go

No more in bondage shall they toil
Let my people go
Let them come out with Egypt’s spoil”
Let my people go

"Now, of course, the slave didn’t get his democracy from the Bill of Rights. He got it from his reading of the moral justice of the Hebrew prophets and his concept of the wrath of God. And, particularly, his mind seized on the experience of the Jews in Egypt and of the figure of Moses, the savior of the people, leading them out of bondage, and, therefore, there is not only no more musically beautiful spiritual, but no more symbolic spiritual than “Go Down Moses."

Alain Locke

O Black and Unknown Bards

by James Weldon Johnson


O black and unknown bards of long ago,
How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?
How, in your darkness, did you come to know
The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?
Who first from midst his bonds lifted his eyes?
Who first from out the still watch, lone and long,
Feeling the ancient faith of prophets rise
Within his dark-kept soul, burst into song?[1]



In 1871, a mere 8 years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, embarked on a pilgrimage that would introduce the slave hymn to a vast number whites in America for the first time. This would possibly be their first lesson in African American culture, at the least a lesson whose content and scope were not wholly determined by the same forces that aligned themselves to construct blacks as beasts of burden fit for the American system of chattel slavery. For that reason primarily, according to noted researcher and historian Eileen Southern, this was not a decision to be made lightly for the “American public had not yet heard the religious music of the slaves and had given no indication that it was ready to hear it.”[2]

Singing what Andrew Ward, in his book Dark Midnight When I Rise, called the “secret soul music of their ancestors,”[3] they set out on a creative trajectory that would inevitably transform world musical culture. Under the direction of George L. White, a young white teacher at the newly established Fisk University, they set out on a journey singing songs that “conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea, before Queen and Kaiser, in Scotland and Ireland, Holland and Switzerland.”[4]


[1] Johnson, James Weldon., and J.Rosamond Johnson. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Viking Pr., 1951. 11

[2] Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971. 226

[3] Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. New York: Amsted, 2001. xiii

[4] Dubois, WEB, Souls of Black Folks

Ella Shepard, Original Member of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

“The slave songs were never used by us then in public,” wrote Ella Shepherd. “They were associated with slavery and the dark past, and represented the things to be forgotten. Then, too, they were sacred to our parents, who use them in their religious worship and shouted over them…We did not dream of ever using them in public.”[1]



[1] Ella Shepard, Historical Sketch of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Fisk University News, October 1911 (FU) quoted in Ward, Andrew. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers. New York: Amsted, 2001. 110

The context as well as the style and structure had to change. First there is the matter of style and the transformation/transition of the folk spiritual to the arranged concertized variety. There were noticeable differences in the aesthetic. One might even say that there was a very clear move to shift the weight from an African to a more Euro American sense of decorum. Evidence, analysis and witness prove this to be true. According to Dr. Work, “Mr. White decided on a style of singing the spiritual which eliminated every element that detracted from the pure emotion of the song…White strove for an art presentation.”[1] Mellonee V. Burnim describes the music thusly:

The handclapping, foot stomping, and individual latitude in interpreting the melodic line that characterized the folk spiritual were replaced by predictability, controlled reserve, and the absence of overt demonstrative behavior. [2]

Read from the perspective of a music theorist, this could be construed as merely being a creative reinterpretation or “remix” of the folk idiom for the concert stage. However, when the music theorist turns sociologist, theomusicologist, or liberation theologian, the hermeneutical lens changes and the implications take on more gravitas. Burnim further elaborates.

The aesthetic values that characterized George White's own musical culture were now being superimposed on to the Negro spiritual. As Louis Silveri argues, "Singing spirituals in the field was one thing, singing them to sophisticated audiences [read white] was something else."[3]




[1] Burnim, Mellonee V., and Portia Maultsby K. . African American Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. p. 62
[2] ibid. pg. 63
[3] ibid. pg. 63

Sometime I Feel Like a Motherless Child

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long ways from home
A long ways from home
True believer
A long ways from home
Along ways from home

Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Way up in de heab’nly land
Way up in de heab’nly land
True believer
Way up in de heab’nly land
Way up in de heab’nly land

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long ways from home
There’s praying everywhere

Johnson, James Weldon., and J.Rosamond Johnson. The Books of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Viking Pr., 1951.

No More Auction Block for Me

No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousand gone

No more peck of corn for me…

No more driver’s lash for me…

No more pint of salt for me…

No more hundred lash for me…

No more mistress’ call for me…

Oh, freedom!
Oh, freedom!
Oh, freedom over me!
And before I'd be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
There'll be singin'
There’ll be singin’
There’ll be singin’ over me
And before I’d be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
There'll be shoutin'
There’ll be shoutin’
There’ll be shoutin’ over me
And before I’d be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
Repeat verse 1

To perform the spiritual was to perform one's individual and collective identity as a person of African descent in the New World. To perform the spiritual, whether they exhibited double entendre or not-that is whether they convey subliminal messages understood only by the initiated, or members of the group-was to wage systematic warfare on the institution that imposed the chains of bondage. To sing the spiritual was to be free.

Burnim, Mellonee V., and Portia Maultsby K. . African American Music. 2006. New York: Routledge. Print. p. 62

“And to make thee high above all the nations which he hath made, in praise and in name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the Lord thy god.  “... I have assumed [this] text as introductory to a discourse upon the political welfare of God’s American Israel, and as allusively prophetic of the future prosperity and splendour of the United States... already does the new constellation of the united States begin to realize this glory.  It has already risen to an acknowledged sovereignty among the republics and kingdoms of the world.  And we have reason to hope, and I believe to expect, that god has still greater blessings in store for this vine which his own right hand hath planted, to make us “high among the nations of praise, and in name, and in honour.”[1]




[1] Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor (1783) quoted in Raboteau, Albert J. Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1997. Print. pg. 30

“America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain!  Dark and dismal is the cloud that hangs over thee, for thy cruel wrongs and injuries to the fallen sons of Africa.  The blood of her murdered ones cries to heaven for vengeance against Thee ... You may kill, tyrannize, and oppress as much as you choose, until our cry shall come up before the throne of God; for I am firmly persuaded, that he will not suffer you to quell the proud, fearless and undaunted spirits of the Africans forever; for in his own time, he is able to plead our cause against you, and to pour out upon you the ten plagues of Egypt.”[1]





[1] Maria W. Stewart, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation On Which We Must Build (Boston 1831) quoted in Raboteau, Albert J. Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1997. Print. pg. 31

Go Down Moses was not just a song, it represented a reconstituting of black personhood through the repurposing of narrative. Stories hold the power “to create or destroy a worldview.”[1]

The songs clear purpose was to challenge and debunk the American mythology fought with tales of white racial superiority and delusions of Manifest Destiny. It serves the function of meta-narrative and is an unmasked, scathing critique of the American chattel slavery system and it’s proponents.

While many mainstream white theologians were engaging in a celebratory national “discourse upon the political welfare of God’s American Israel,”[2] the African sang a different chorus. “America, America, foul and indelible is thy stain!  Dark and dismal is the cloud that hangs over thee, for thy cruel wrongs and injuries to the fallen sons of Africa.”[3] Go Down Moses mirrors Maria Stewarts indignation and disgust in it’s recasting of America as Egypt, the slaveowner Pharaoh, and the enslaved the chosen children of Israel. Perhaps it is due to this function that the Johnson brothers place it first among the many in their Book of American Negro Spirituals.


[1] Hoyt, Thomas “Interpreting Biblical Scholarship for the Black Church Tradition” in Felder, Cain Hope. Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. Print. pg. 25
[2] Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor (1783) quoted in Raboteau, Albert J. Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1997. Print. pg. 30
[3] Maria W. Stewart, Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation On Which We Must Build (Boston 1831) quoted in Raboteau, Albert J. Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1997. Print. pg. 31

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.

To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.

I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.” 

If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd's plantation…let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because "there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.[1]


[1] Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. New York: New American Library, 1968.

The spirituals are the taproot of our folk music stemming generations down from the core of the group experience in the body of soul suffering slavery and expressing for the race, for the nation, for the world, the spiritual fruitage of that hard experience. But they are not merely slave songs, nor even Negro folksongs. The very elements that make them spiritually expressive of the Negro make them, at the same time, deeply representative of the soil that produced them. They constitute a great, and now increasingly appreciated body of regional American folk song and music. As unique spiritual products of American life, they have become nationally, as well as racially characteristic. They also promise to be one of the profitable wellsprings of native idiom in serious American music. In that sense, they belong to a common heritage. And properly appreciated and used can be, should be, will be a part of the cultural tie that binds.




Alain Locke introducing the Spirituals at a Library of Congress event the "Festival of Music Commemorating the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary of the Proclamation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," 1940.