Let Us Break Bread Together: A Song History
"Let Us Break Bread Together" is an African American spiritual that Hymnary.org places, probably, in the American South before the Civil War.[1] Writing for Discipleship Ministries, hymnologist C. Michael Hawn reports Carlton Young's view that it took shape in the Gullah/Geechee culture of the colonial Southeast's coastal regions.[2] Hymnary.org also records a different theory, from Miles Mark Fisher's 1953 study of slave songs, that it served enslaved Virginians in the eighteenth century as a signal for secret meetings; Hawn treats the secret-signal reading as something that cannot be verified.[1][2] Its use at Communion services probably came after the Civil War, according to Hymnary.org.[1]
Samuel Minott, Communion Dish, silver, ca. 1764. A colonial American communion dish, shown for the spiritual's use at Communion; it has no connection to the song.
According to the Hymnology Archive, the spiritual reached print twice in 1925, both times from St. Helena, South Carolina: as words alone in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, reportedly gathered from Penn School students in 1923, and in Nicholas Ballanta's Saint Helena Island Spirituals, which kept the singers' dialect.[3] A variant collected in nearby Beaufort, with a third phrase that climbs rather than holding still, appeared in The Carolina Low-Country in 1931.[3] J. Rosamond Johnson's 1926 setting for voice and piano in The Second Book of Negro Spirituals made it a concert piece, and in the mid-twentieth century soloists such as Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson made it widely known.[3][2] The Hymnology Archive traces its entry into American hymnals to the Churches of God Hymnal of 1953, and Hawn suggests it may be the Communion song United Methodists sing most often.[3][2] Because many churches neither kneel to receive Communion nor face east, some hymnals have reworded its lines about kneeling and the rising sun.[2][3]
Larry Conger has arranged it as a stand-alone piece for a mountain dulcimer trio or ensemble of standard, baritone and bass dulcimers in DAD tuning, published by Dulcimerican Music.[4]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "Let us break bread together on our knees".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Let Us Break Bread Together'".
- Hymnology Archive: "Let us break bread together on our knees".
- Larry Conger: "Let Us Break Bread Together For Dulcimer Trio/Ensemble".
- Image: Samuel Minott, Communion Dish, silver, ca. 1764. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.