Down In The River To Pray: A Song History

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The earliest printed form of this song found in the sources consulted here appears in Slave Songs of the United States, the 1867 collection of songs of enslaved African Americans compiled by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison and published in New York by A. Simpson & Co.[1][2] It is No. 104 in that book, titled "The Good Old Way," and sits in the section devoted to the inland slave states of Tennessee, Arkansas and the Mississippi River.[2][3] The editors credited it to G. H. Allan of Nashville, though the hymnologist C. Michael Hawn thinks Allan more likely passed along a song he knew than wrote one himself.[2][3]

1940 photograph of a church congregation gathered at the edge of a creek for a baptism

Marion Post Wolcott, “Members of the Primitive Baptist Church in Morehead, Kentucky, attending a creek baptizing by submersion,” photograph, August 1940. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The 1867 version is not yet a river song. Its singer goes down to the valley to pray and invites a mourner to come along, whereas later versions move the scene to a river and call in brothers, sisters and other relatives verse by verse.[2] A related song, "Come, Let Us All Go Down," was printed later in the century in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers, the book of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.[2] Some writers have read the river, the starry crown and the plea to be shown the way as hidden directions for escape from slavery. Hawn treats that reading with caution, since no known nineteenth-century text mentions a river at all.[2]

The song reached its largest audience through Joel and Ethan Coen's 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?[4] Alison Krauss sang lead on the soundtrack recording, heard as a procession of worshippers in white passes the film's heroes on the way to a baptism in a river, in a scene set in rural Mississippi.[5][2] The T Bone Burnett–produced soundtrack came out on December 5, 2000, and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards in February 2002.[5] Since then the song has spread through many choral arrangements, and hymnals have placed it among their baptism songs, beginning with Gather Comprehensive (second edition, 2004).[2]

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Sources

  1. Smithsonian Libraries: "Slave songs of the United States".
  2. Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): "History of Hymns: 'Down to the River to Pray'".
  3. The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology: "Down to the valley [river] to pray".
  4. Britannica: "O Brother, Where Art Thou?".
  5. GRAMMY.com: "20 Years Ago, 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' Crashed The Country Music Party".