Do Lord: A Song History

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"Do, Lord, Remember Me" is an African American spiritual whose beginnings, as C. Michael Hawn puts it, "are lost in history"; he places it most likely in the antebellum South and connects its plea with the request of the thief crucified beside Jesus in Luke 23:42.[1] The repeated cry also turns up in Slave Songs of the United States (1867) under the title "Lord, Remember Me," though Hawn notes that the tune there has nothing in common with the one sung today.[1] The earliest printing in an African American source that he was able to find is in Edward Boatner's Spirituals Triumphant Old and New (Nashville, 1927); a variant had already appeared in Homer Rodeheaver's Plantation Melodies (Chicago, 1918), and the version in his posthumous Hymns for Praise and Service (1956) resembles, Hawn says, what children learned in evangelical Sunday schools of the 1950s and 1960s.[1]

Worthington Whittredge painting of a crowd gathered for an outdoor camp meeting in a sunlit grove beside a still pond

Worthington Whittredge, The Camp Meeting, oil on canvas, 1874. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An outdoor religious gathering; it has no connection to the song.

In 1936 John A. Lomax and Harold Spivacke recorded the song for the Library of Congress in Virginia, sung by Jimmie Strothers and Joe Lee; the catalogue notes that it was made at a state farm.[2] Strother (the spelling used by the Library of Virginia and by his biographer, Gregg D. Kimball) was a blind musician then held at the Virginia State Prison Farm, where he recorded for Lomax in June 1936, and the Library of Virginia places the Lomax and Spivacke visit to the farm, in Goochland County, in the same month.[3][4] The performance opens Negro Religious Songs and Services, a five-disc album drawn from the Library's Archive of American Folk Song and published in 1943.[5]

Hawn points to a country blues recording by Mississippi John Hurt and calls Johnny Cash's country gospel version, on My Mother's Hymn Book (2004), perhaps the most popular recording of the evangelical form.[1][6] In church use, Songs of Zion (1981) appears, in Hawn's view, to have fixed the stanzas that most later publications print, and The United Methodist Hymnal (1989) carries an arrangement by William Farley Smith.[1][7]

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Sources

  1. UMC Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: 'Do, Lord, Remember Me'".
  2. CREM-CNRS Sound Archives: "Do, Lord, Remember Me" (Jimmie Strothers and Joe Lee, 1936).
  3. University of Virginia Press: "Searching for Jimmie Strother: A Tale of Music, Murder, and Memory" (Gregg D. Kimball).
  4. Library of Virginia, Virginia Roots Music: "Field Recordings".
  5. CREM-CNRS Sound Archives: "Album X: Negro Religious Songs and Services, from the Archive of American Folk Song".
  6. Oshkosh Public Library catalogue: "My Mother's Hymn Book" (Johnny Cash).
  7. Hymnary.org: "Do, Lord, Remember Me" (text).