Old-Time Religion: A Song History
“Old-Time Religion” is an African American spiritual from the nineteenth-century South. It first reached print through the books that documented the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the touring student choir of Fisk University: it appears in Gustavus D. Pike’s 1873 account of the singers’ fundraising campaign and again in J. B. T. Marsh’s later The Story of the Jubilee Singers, in a version of four stanzas.[1][2] Two denominational hymnals suggest it may serve as an alternate refrain to another spiritual, “Old Ship of Zion,” which shares a nearly identical melody, though other hymnals do not make that link.[1]
W. H. Rease, Exterior view of West Branch camp meeting, Clinton Co., Pa., color lithograph, c. 1872. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.
The song’s path into white gospel music runs through Charlie D. Tillman, an Atlanta singer, songwriter and publisher of gospel songbooks. Tillman heard African American worshippers sing it at a revival meeting in South Carolina—Lexington in 1889, according to one account—wrote down the words and tune, reworked them, and published his arrangement in an 1891 songbook, The Revival, expanded to nine stanzas and under his own copyright.[1][3] From there it moved into the hymnals of many denominations; Hymnary.org indexes the tune in more than 350 hymnals and credits it as a traditional African American spiritual.[4] Recordings range from the Tuskegee Institute Singers in 1915 to Mahalia Jackson and Johnny Cash, and the song is heard in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind.[1]
Beyond the hymnals, the song has a place in mountain dulcimer repertoire: it is one of the 68 hymns and gospel songs in Stephen Seifert’s jam-session book Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[5]
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