I Want To Be Ready: A Song History

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"I Want To Be Ready" is an African American spiritual, catalogued by Hymnary.org under its other title, "Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John."[1] By 1880 it was in print: the revised edition of J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers; with Their Songs, published in Boston by Houghton, Mifflin, gives it as No. 122, under a heading that joins both titles.[2]

Color lithograph of Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives

David Roberts, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, color lithograph, 1839. Shown for the song's other title; it has no connection to the song.

The soprano Kitty Cheatham recorded it unaccompanied for Victor in New York on January 12, 1916, on a side shared with another spiritual.[3] Harry T. Burleigh arranged the spiritual for voice and piano, and Ricordi published his setting in New York in 1917.[4] The Fisk University Jubilee Singers, here a male quartet, recorded it for Columbia in New York on December 22, 1920, and the recording was issued as Columbia A3726.[5]

The song has stayed in church hymnals: The United Methodist Hymnal of 1989 prints it as No. 722, adapted and arranged by William Farley Smith,[6] and Hymnary.org lists it in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal of 2011.[1] Larry Conger includes it in American Spirituals Arranged For The Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of spirituals that its listing describes as fairly easy to play, published by Fingers Of Steel.[7]

Our book that contains the song "I Want To Be Ready"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John".
  2. Internet Archive (Smithsonian Libraries): "The Story of the Jubilee Singers; with Their Songs" (J. B. T. Marsh, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1880).
  3. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-16999. Walk in Jerusalem just like John / Kitty Cheatham".
  4. IMSLP: "I Want to be Ready (Burleigh, Harry Thacker)".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix 79591. I want to be ready / Fisk University Jubilee Singers".
  6. Hymnary.org: "722. I Want to Be Ready" (The United Methodist Hymnal).
  7. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, American Spirituals Tab Book".
  8. Image: David Roberts, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, color lithograph, 1839. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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