Rise Up Shepherd And Follow: A Song History
“Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow” is an African American spiritual, and little is known for certain about where it came from.[1] Its earliest known printing was in fiction rather than a song collection: Ruth McEnery Stuart’s short story “Christmas Gifts,” in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for January 1891, in which enslaved people on a Louisiana plantation sing it while performing for their master’s household at Christmas.[2][3] A somewhat different version printed by Clara Eames in 1900 suggests that Stuart collected the song rather than composed it, but how accurately she set it down is unknown.[2]
Jean Jacques Lagrenée, Annunciation to the Shepherds, pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, heightened with white, on blue-washed paper, 1775. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
Music for the song was first printed in 1902 in The Southern Workman, the journal of Hampton Institute in Virginia, and it then appeared in Hampton’s Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations (1909), labelled a Christmas plantation song; R. Nathaniel Dett included it in his new edition of the collection in 1927.[2][3] The song uses call-and-response, and its lowered seventh note is one of its most recognizable features.[1][2][3]
The spiritual reached denominational hymnals only in the 1980s and is now found in dozens of them.[1][3] It has also been recorded by concert artists, among them Kathleen Battle with the Boys Choir of Harlem and the King’s Singers.[3]
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