Just A Closer Walk With Thee: A Song History

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“Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is a gospel song from the African American church tradition, and no one knows who wrote it; Hymnary.org lists both its words and its tune as anonymous.[1] Its life before the late 1930s is hard to trace. The Preservation Hall Foundation suggests it probably took shape in Black churches of the nineteenth-century South, while Hymnary.org dates its spread as a popular spiritual among Southern African Americans to the 1930s and 1940s.[2][1] The text, as Hymnary.org prints it, is a believer’s prayer for strength and for God’s nearness through life’s hardships and at its close.[1]

Black-and-white photograph of trumpeter Bunk Johnson and his New Orleans band, including clarinetist George Lewis and trombonist Jim Robinson, on the bandstand

William P. Gottlieb, Bunk Johnson's New Orleans band at the Stuyvesant Casino, New York, ca. June 1946. Library of Congress, Gottlieb Collection. Public domain (Gottlieb dedication).

The song reached print through Kenneth Morris, the Chicago gospel composer and organist at the First Church of Deliverance. Accounts of how he came by it differ. In his own recollection, Morris first heard a choir sing it at a meeting in Kansas City, and the man who led it had known the song all his life without knowing its source; some scholars instead credit the gospel singers Robert Anderson and R. L. Knowles with bringing it to him.[3] Morris made a choral arrangement, and in 1940 Martin & Morris, the publishing house he had just founded with singer Sallie Martin, issued it as sheet music, naming Kansas City’s William B. Hurse as the singer it came from.[3] The first known recording was made by the Selah Jubilee Singers for Decca in New York on October 8, 1941, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe cut her own version for Decca that December.[3][4] When the Southern publisher R. E. Winsett filed a copyright on the song in 1948, Morris took it as a warning and began copyrighting his own work, while Stamps-Baxter songbooks of the same years printed it as anonymous.[3] Country star Red Foley recorded it in 1950, and singers as different as Tennessee Ernie Ford, Ella Fitzgerald and Joan Baez later took it up.[4]

In New Orleans the song became a fixture of the jazz funeral. Brass bands play it as a slow dirge while the pallbearers carry the casket from the church to the hearse, handing the melody from one instrument to the next over a quiet bass-drum and snare beat,[2] and it remains the tune most closely tied to that custom.[4] Among mountain dulcimer players, Stephen Seifert includes it with 67 other hymns and gospel songs in his book Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[5]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Just a Closer Walk With Thee".
  2. Preservation Hall Foundation, Brass Bandbook: "Just A Closer Walk With Thee".
  3. Hymnology Archive: "Just a closer walk with thee".
  4. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church): "History of Hymns" (on “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”).
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".