Go Tell It On The Mountain: A Song History

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“Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African American spiritual. Its earliest known printing is in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, published by the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1909, where it appeared as a Christmas plantation song with verses different from those sung today.[1][2][3] That edition’s preface thanks Professor F. J. Work of Fisk University for some newly added songs, but the Hampton book does not mark this one as coming from Fisk.[1][3] Some accounts say John Wesley Work Jr. first published it in his 1907 book Folk Songs of the American Negro, but Hymnary.org notes that the song is not found in the known editions of that work.[4]

Shadowy ink-and-wash drawing of shepherds resting on a hillside at night as an angel appears above

Jacopo Bassano (Jacopo da Ponte), The Annunciation to the Shepherds, pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, highlighted with white, on green-washed paper. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The familiar verses, which retell the shepherds’ story from Luke 2, are usually credited to John Wesley Work Jr. (often called John W. Work II), who, with his brother Frederick J. Work, directed Fisk’s Jubilee Singers around the turn of the twentieth century; some sources credit Frederick instead.[1][2][4] According to Hymnology Archive, the song does not appear in any Fisk collection before 1940, when John W. Work III, the elder Work’s son, included it in American Negro Songs and Spirituals with a note that the original verses could not be found.[1][2][4] Work III recalled Fisk students singing it before dawn on Christmas morning when he was a boy.[1][4] Because Hampton printed the song first while the Fisk version is the one most widely spread, Hymnology Archive concludes that both schools hold “a claim to a perennial Christmas favorite.”[1]

The spiritual reached mainline Protestant hymnals with The Pilgrim Hymnal in 1958; C. Michael Hawn calls it “a truly American contribution to the telling of the Christmas story.”[2] It also served the civil rights movement. In Alabama, singers fitted new words to it about Governor Wallace,[2] and in Mississippi the organizer Fannie Lou Hamer made it, along with “This Little Light of Mine,” a signature of her activism; a recording of her leading it is preserved on Smithsonian Folkways’ Voices of the Civil Rights Movement.[5][6] Peter, Paul and Mary later recorded a version titled “Tell It on the Mountain” on their 1963 album In the Wind.[7]

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Sources

  1. Hymnology Archive: “Go, Tell It on the Mountain”.
  2. Discipleship Ministries (C. Michael Hawn): “History of Hymns: ‘Go, Tell It on the Mountain’”.
  3. Internet Archive: “Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations” (Hampton Institute Press, 1909).
  4. Hymnary.org: “Go, Tell It on the Mountain”.
  5. PBS American Experience: “Fannie Lou Hamer”.
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (Fannie Lou Hamer, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement).
  7. Peter, Paul and Mary (official site): “Tell It On The Mountain”.