Kingdom Coming: A Song History

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“Kingdom Coming” was written by Henry Clay Work, a Connecticut-born printer whose abolitionist father had kept a way station on the Underground Railroad at his Illinois home.[1] Root & Cady of Chicago issued it in 1862 as a song for voice and piano with chorus.[2] George F. Root later recalled Work arriving at his office with the manuscript, and the meeting led the firm to hire him as a songwriter.[3] Work composed it for the minstrel stage before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and it became a hit for Christy’s Minstrels;[4] it was a blackface minstrel song.[5] Its words use the mock Black dialect of minstrelsy and take the viewpoint of enslaved people rejoicing as their enslaver flees the approaching Union army.[1] The “Jubilo” of its alternate title refers to the biblical Year of Jubilee, in which slaves were to be set free.[5]

1861 group photograph of formerly enslaved men, women and children gathered on the deck of a Union ship at Port Royal, South Carolina

Henry P. Moore, Contrabands Aboard U.S. Ship Vermont, Port Royal, South Carolina, photograph, 1861. “Contraband” was the wartime term for people who escaped slavery to Union lines. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The song spread quickly. Root & Cady promoted it with an early advertising campaign, it became known across North America, and Union soldiers heard enslaved people themselves singing it in Louisiana.[1] An instrumental setting followed: a piano solo arrangement by A. Baumbach that the same firm published in 1863.[6] Soldiers returning home after the war helped carry the melody into folk tradition.[4]

As a fiddle tune, often under the title “Year of Jubilo,”[5] it took root in dance traditions from central Pennsylvania and New York’s Orange County to Prince Edward Island, and Sam and Kirk McGee recorded it for Vocalion in 1927.[4] The folk revival kept it in circulation: Pete Seeger sang it on his 1960 Folkways album Songs of the Civil War,[7] the Red Clay Ramblers recorded it in 1975,[4] and a version from the Hollow Rock String Band appears in Brody’s 1983 collection The Fiddler’s Fakebook.[5]

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Sources

  1. Notable Biographies: "Henry Clay Work Biography".
  2. Internet Archive (Gaylord Music Library, Washington University in St. Louis): "Kingdom Coming: Song and Chorus" (Root & Cady, 1862).
  3. Songwriters Hall of Fame: "Henry C. Work".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Kingdom Coming".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation: Year of Jubilo".
  6. Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, Lincoln Memorial University: "Kingdom Coming" (A. Baumbach, piano solo, Root & Cady).
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "Kingdom Coming (Year of Jubilo)" – Pete Seeger, Songs of the Civil War.