My Lord What A Morning: A Song History

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"My Lord, What a Morning" is an African American spiritual whose roots, in the account C. Michael Hawn gives for the United Methodist Church's Discipleship Ministries, lead back to early nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Following the musicologist Eileen Southern, Hawn ties it to an unsigned hymn on the last trumpet and the falling stars, No. 10 in A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns (1801), compiled by Richard Allen, first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; he concludes that the spiritual probably took shape in the North at some point between that book and 1867, when a version titled "Stars Begin to Fall" was printed in Slave Songs of the United States[1]. Angela M. S. Nelson, writing in Christian History, also treats the spiritual as a remaking of Allen's hymn through improvisation and added refrains, but she credits it to an enslaved composer, so the two accounts differ over who shaped it[2]. Hawn traces the falling stars to end-time passages in Revelation and Matthew[1].

Joseph Gandy watercolor of the sun's rays spreading across a cloudy morning sky above a river

Joseph Michael Gandy, Landscape with rising sun, December 1, 1828, 8:30 a.m., watercolor over graphite, 1828. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its morning sky; it has no connection to the spiritual.

According to Hawn, the form most people sing today was first published in 1874 in Thomas P. Fenner's Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students, with the key word spelled "morning"[1]; that year it also appeared, spelled the same way, among the fifty plantation songs Fenner arranged for the book Hampton and Its Students (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons)[3]. J. B. T. Marsh's account of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, The Story of the Jubilee Singers, with Their Songs, printed it soon after as "mourning"; Hawn cites a London edition of 1875, and the London edition of 1876 carries it as No. 79[1][4]. The spelling has varied ever since: James Weldon Johnson called "mourning" a misprint, while Hawn finds both readings defensible and suggests that singers who learned the song by ear may have welcomed the double meaning[1]. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois singled it out as one of ten master works of the slave song tradition, named it "the song of the End and the Beginning," and set a strain of its melody at the head of his chapter "Of the Dawn of Freedom"[5].

In the twentieth century the spiritual moved onto the concert stage. Harry T. Burleigh's setting for solo voice and piano was issued by Ricordi in the second album of his Celebrated Negro Spirituals[6], and the contralto Marian Anderson recorded the song for Victor in late 1924, with orchestra and with Burleigh credited as arranger, issued as Victor 19560[7]; Paul Robeson, with Lawrence Brown at the piano, also recorded it for His Master's Voice on a disc crediting Burleigh[8]. Anderson later took the song's title for her 1956 autobiography[1]. Hymnals now generally call the tune BURLEIGH, a name chosen by William Farley Smith, whose arrangement is No. 719 in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989)[1][9].

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Sources

  1. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church), C. Michael Hawn: "History of Hymns: My Lord, What a Morning".
  2. Christian History Institute, Angela M. S. Nelson: "The Spiritual" (Christian History 31, 1991).
  3. Internet Archive: "Hampton and Its Students" (M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, with fifty Cabin and Plantation Songs arranged by Thomas P. Fenner; New York, 1874).
  4. Internet Archive: "The Story of the Jubilee Singers, with Their Songs" (J. B. T. Marsh; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876).
  5. Project Gutenberg: "The Souls of Black Folk" (W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903), ch. XIV, "Of the Sorrow Songs".
  6. Internet Archive: "The Celebrated Negro Spirituals" (arranged by H. T. Burleigh; London and New York: Ricordi).
  7. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-31347. My Lord, what a mornin' / Marian Anderson".
  8. Internet Archive (Great 78 Project): "My Lord, What A Mornin'" (Paul Robeson and Lawrence Brown; His Master's Voice B 2897).
  9. Hymnary.org: "My Lord, What a Morning" (The United Methodist Hymnal, No. 719).