Lord, I Want To Be A Christian: A Song History
"Lord, I Want to Be a Christian" is an African American spiritual whose words and melody have no known author; Hymnary.org says plainly that no one knows where either one came from.[1] Its first known appearance in print was in Folk Songs of the American Negro, published in Nashville in 1907, which C. Michael Hawn describes as edited by Frederick J. Work with an introduction by John W. Work Jr.[2] Hymnary.org's hymnal notes instead credit the two brothers jointly as compilers and show that the tune, known as LORD, I WANT TO BE A CHRISTIAN, was printed there along with the text.[3] Hawn says the collection grew out of the performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who took spirituals to a wider audience, and writes that the 1907 printing largely settled the wording hymnals use today, though later books dropped one of its stanzas.[2] Hymnary.org identifies the omitted verse as the one about Judas.[1]
Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, wood engraving after his painting, 1880. Children reading together with an elder on a Virginia Sunday morning; it has no connection to the spiritual.
Where the song began is uncertain. In Negro Slave Songs in the United States (1953), Miles Mark Fisher suggested that it could have originated in Virginia in the 1750s, connecting it with a 1756 account from Hanover in which an enslaved man sought religious instruction from a Presbyterian minister.[3] Hawn recounts the same exchange and names the minister as Samuel Davies, whereas the notes on Hymnary.org call him William Davies, so the sources differ even on that detail.[2][3] Hawn also cites Eileen Guenther's reading of the song's recurring refrain as a possible rebuke to slaveholders who attended worship while mistreating the people they held in bondage.[2]
The spiritual has stayed in steady use: John Wesley Work III printed it, along with a revised version, in his American Negro Songs and Spirituals of 1940, and it now appears in mainline and African American hymnals alike, including The United Methodist Hymnal, which uses an arrangement by William Farley Smith that Hawn finds more chromatic than most.[2] The Psalter Hymnal Handbook, quoted on Hymnary.org, describes it as a reverent call-and-response piece, not to be taken fast, in which a soloist or unison choir sings the verses and the congregation answers in harmony, with little or no accompaniment.[3] Larry Conger sets it in DAD tuning in his American Spirituals Tab Book, published by Fingers Of Steel and sold as a download containing both the complete book and a separate file for each song.[4]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "Featured Hymn: Lord, I Want to Be a Christian".
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Lord, I want to be a Christian'".
- Hymnary.org: "Psalter Hymnal (Gray) 264. Lord, I Want to Be a Christian".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, American Spirituals Tab Book".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Sunday Morning in Virginia, wood engraving after his painting, 1880. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.