Wade In The Water: A Song History

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"Wade in the Water" is an African American spiritual with no known author; Hymnary.org lists it as traditional and assigns it to the broad span of about 1750 to 1875.[1] Hymnologist C. Michael Hawn ties its refrain to the Gospel of John's account of the pool of Bethesda, whose waters an angel was said to stir before a healing, and hears the Red Sea crossing of Exodus in its opening verses.[2] An essay on the Song of America site credits the Fisk Jubilee Singers with introducing it as a concert spiritual and says it was printed in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1901.[3] The Hymnology Archive instead dates that collection, edited by F. J. Work, to about 1902, so sources differ on the exact year.[4]

A woman carrying a jug wades a shallow stream beside cattle, sheep and a rider on horseback, with trees on either bank.

Jan Siberechts, Peasants Crossing a Stream, oil on canvas, c. 1670. Country people wading a stream with their cattle, painted by Jan Siberechts about 1670, shown for the spiritual's title; the painting has no connection to the song.

The song also lived well outside the concert hall: the Traditional Ballad Index cites versions printed in collections from the Georgia Sea Islands and the West Virginia hills, along with a recording in which it paced commercial oyster shucking, each worker keeping a separate rhythm while all sang together.[5] The earliest dated entry in that index is a 1925 Paramount record by the Sunset Four Jubilee Singers, followed by releases from other quartets and jubilee groups into the 1930s.[5] In 1966 Ramsey Lewis's trio had a Top 40 hit with its version of the spiritual.[6]

A story, stated as fact in the Song of America essay, holds that the song served on the Underground Railroad to send people escaping slavery into the water so tracking dogs would lose them.[3] A myths-and-facts sheet posted on the National Park Service's Tubman park site, however, lists the claim that Harriet Tubman sang it as a signal among the myths and points out that Sarah Bradford's biography names two other songs Tubman sang.[7] Today the spiritual appears in 39 hymnals indexed by Hymnary.org, among them Songs of Zion (1981) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006).[1] Larry Conger sets it in DAD tuning in Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs, a Fingers Of Steel songbook whose download includes each piece as its own PDF alongside the complete book.[8]

Our books that contain the song "Wade In The Water"

Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "Wade in the Water".
  2. Discipleship Ministries: "History of Hymns: Wade in the Water".
  3. Song of America: "The Shift to the Concert Stage: Wade in the Water and the American Spiritual".
  4. Hymnology Archive: "Fisk University".
  5. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Wade in the Water".
  6. Boston Globe: "Renowned jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis has died at 87".
  7. National Park Service: "Myths & Facts About Harriet Tubman".
  8. Fingers Of Steel: "Larry Conger, Hymns, Spirituals, And Sacred Songs".
  9. Image: Jan Siberechts, Peasants Crossing a Stream, oil on canvas, c. 1670. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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