Nobody Knows The Trouble I See: A Song History
"Nobody Knows the Trouble I See" is an African American spiritual that reached print soon after the Civil War, as number 74 in Slave Songs of the United States (1867), the collection compiled by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison.[1][2] The compilers, who printed it as "Nobody knows the trouble I've had," report that it had been a favorite in Charleston's schools for Black children in 1865 and had since spread to the Sea Islands, and that a transcription sent from Florida by Lieutenant Colonel Apthorp differed only slightly in accentuation.[2] Their note also relates an anecdote: at a tense Sea Islands gathering over the government's uncertain policy on confiscated lands, General Howard, struggling to address the freedpeople, asked them to sing, and when an old woman began this song and the whole gathering took it up, he was said to have been moved to tears.[2]
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ Walking on the Waters, etching, c. 1910. Shown for its theme of faith in trouble; it has no connection to the spiritual.
Student singers took the song on the road in the 1870s: it was heard at a Princeton concert in 1874, and Hampton's students performed it on a national tour to raise money for the school's Virginia Hall.[1][3] Hampton and Its Students (1874) printed a four-part arrangement by Thomas P. Fenner, Hampton's choral director, whose music the hymnologist C. Michael Hawn judges the closest to the versions in today's hymnals.[1][3] The Fisk Jubilee Singers sang a different, minor-key melody, printed in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers (London, 1876), and John Wesley Work II placed it first in New Jubilee Songs (1902).[1] W. E. B. Du Bois quoted the opening two measures of its music in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), among the songs he called the Sorrow Songs.[1]
Fritz Kreisler recorded a violin setting, credited to Clarence Cameron White, for Victor in 1919.[4] Paul Robeson recorded it in Camden, New Jersey, on January 25, 1926, in an arrangement by his accompanist Lawrence Brown, issued on Victor 20068.[5] It remains in church use, appearing in Songs of Zion (1981) and, harmonized by William Farley Smith, as number 520 in The United Methodist Hymnal (1989).[1][6] Lorinda Jones arranges it in DAD tuning, as "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen," in her Sacred Music Collection, a 58-page Fingers Of Steel book of 31 hymns, spirituals and gospel songs for mountain dulcimer, set with a vocal staff and suggested chords.[7]
Sources
- Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: 'Nobody Knows the Trouble I See'" (C. Michael Hawn).
- Internet Archive: "Slave Songs of the United States" (Allen, Ware and Garrison, 1867).
- Hampton University: "Title: Nobody Knows the Trouble I See".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 64824 (Red Seal 10-in. single-faced)".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-34438. Nobody knows de trouble I've seen / Paul Robeson".
- Hymnary.org: "Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Lorinda Jones, Sacred Music Collection".
- Image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ Walking on the Waters, etching, c. 1910. The Cleveland Museum of Art.