Balm In Gilead: A Song History

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"There Is a Balm in Gilead" takes its image from Jeremiah 8:22, where the prophet asks whether Gilead has no balm and no physician to heal his people.[1][2] Church-music scholar C. Michael Hawn observes that the chapter ends in rhetorical questions, which the spiritual's refrain meets with a note of hope.[1] He quotes the theologian Howard Thurman's description of the refrain: "He straightened the question mark in Jeremiah's sentence into an exclamation point."[1] The prophet's question also turns up in secular verse: Edgar Allan Poe's narrator asks it in "The Raven," as printed in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845.[3]

Red chalk drawing of the prophet Jeremiah seated, with an angel beside him

Sebastiano Conca, The Prophet Jeremiah, red chalk, 1718. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The Hymnology Archive traces the refrain's wording back through earlier English and American hymnals, starting with two John Newton hymns in Olney Hymns (1779).[4] By 1853 Washington Glass had turned similar lines into a refrain in The Revivalist, published in Columbus, pairing them with Newton's "How lost was my condition"; Glass claimed the whole hymn, though the archive suggests his real contribution was at most a single line.[4] Hawn points to a comparable unattributed refrain in The Chorus (7th edition, Philadelphia, 1858), and observes that the spiritual is absent from Slave Songs of the United States (1867).[1] The three-stanza form sung today was first printed in Frederick J. Work's Folk Songs of the American Negro, published at Fisk University in Nashville in 1907.[4][1] The Fisk University Jubilee Quartet, listed in the Discography of American Historical Recordings as the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, recorded it for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on December 9, 1909, issued as Victor 16487.[5][4]

According to Hawn, Work's melody and rhythm passed into H. T. Burleigh's arrangements of 1919 and into Gospel Pearls (1921), a hymnal of the National Baptist Convention.[1] He adds that Paul Robeson sang a two-stanza solo version based on Work's notation, and that William Levi Dawson's 1939 choral setting has proved perhaps the most lasting concert arrangement.[1] Hawn also notes that the three stanzas found in The United Methodist Hymnal had become standard in the early twentieth century.[1] That hymnal prints the song as number 375, identifying words and tune as an Afro-American spiritual and crediting the adaptation and arrangement to William Farley Smith (1986).[2]

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Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'There Is a Balm in Gilead'".
  2. Hymnary.org: "The United Methodist Hymnal 375. There Is a Balm in Gilead".
  3. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore: "The Raven (Text-03b)".
  4. Hymnology Archive: "There is a balm in Gilead".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-8451. There is a balm in Gilead / Fisk University Jubilee Singers".