Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down: A Song History
The Asheville, North Carolina, band Zoe & Cloyd describe "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down" as a traditional African American spiritual, though the sources consulted here give no date or place of origin for it.[1] The band say they took it from a 1965 solo field recording of Frank Proffitt, and they report Proffitt's own claim that his source was Dave Thompson, a Black banjo player who, like Proffitt, came from around Sugar Grove in northwestern North Carolina.[1]
Albrecht Dürer, Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon, from The Apocalypse, woodcut, 1498. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its subject.
The song has also been documented in Black church services. On 10 September 1978 Blanton Owen, fieldworker and recordist for the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project, whose collection is now at the Library of Congress, taped the congregation of Clark's Creek Progressive Primitive Baptist Church near Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia, singing it after a member's testimony; the project's log adds that the congregation sang without a hymnbook and that the piano dropped out after only a few bars.[2] A performance by Sister Fleeta Mitchell and Rev. Willie Mae Eberhart is the first track on Dust-to-Digital's Art of Field Recording Volume I: Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum.[3]
Robert Plant included the song on his 2010 album Band of Joy, and PopMatters reviewer Steve Leftridge recommended that track to listeners whose tastes had moved from Led Zeppelin to Uncle Tupelo.[4]
Find books with Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down for sale →
Sources
- The Bluegrass Situation: "LISTEN: Zoe & Cloyd, 'Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down'".
- Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Documentation - Sound Logs - Presentation Set - Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project collection".
- Dust-to-Digital: "Art of Field Recording Volume I: Traditional Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum Tracklist".
- PopMatters: "Robert Plant: Band of Joy".