I Want Jesus To Walk With Me: A Song History

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I Want Jesus to Walk with Me is an anonymous spiritual set to an anonymous tune, and Hymnary.org's editors think it most likely belongs to the African American tradition.[1] Its roots have been argued over: a 1978 hymnal handbook suggested it was a white spiritual of rural Appalachia, a 1993 companion pointed toward early nineteenth-century camp meetings, and a 2016 companion judged an African American origin more probable.[2] The same account finds no trace of the song in early collections, leaving its first publication date unknown, though Carl Daw's research located a variant form in Dorothy Bolton and Harry Burleigh's 1929 Old Songs Hymnal, a book of words and melodies from Georgia.[2] There are scattered signs that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had it in their early repertoire, but the tale related by Calvin Earl, in which singing it rescued the troupe from a mob on an early tour, may be no more than legend.[2]

Engraving of Christ walking along a road with two disciples carrying staffs

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the Disciples on the Way to Emmaus, etching and engraving, 1571. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the song.

The spiritual also turned up in the civil rights era. The album Movement Soul includes a sung excerpt, identifiable by its refrain as apparently this song though no title is printed in the notes, credited to an unnamed local resident of Selma, Alabama, in October 1963.[3] In 1964 the composer Margaret Bonds based her Montgomery Variations on the spiritual, writing it as a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. after visiting Montgomery in 1963.[4]

Hymnary.org now counts the song in sixty-five hymnals, the earliest it lists being The Youth Hymnary of 1956.[5] Its usual tune name there is SOJOURNER, chosen in honor of Sojourner Truth.[1][5] Hymnal commentators disagree about how it is meant to be sung, one hearing a communal lament and another a sorrow song for a single voice.[1]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Featured Hymn for February 1: I Want Jesus to Walk With Me".
  2. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: I Want Jesus to Walk with Me".
  3. Civil Rights Movement Archive: "Movement Soul" (album notes).
  4. Hollywood Bowl / LA Phil: "Montgomery Variations".
  5. Hymnary.org: "I Want Jesus to Walk with Me" (text).