Walk Together Children: A Song History
"Walk Together Children" is an African American spiritual, credited in modern hymnals simply as traditional.[1] It was already in print by 1874, when Hampton and Its Students, a book about Virginia's Hampton Institute with cabin and plantation songs arranged by Thomas P. Fenner, gave it the heading "A Great Camp-Meetin' in de Promised Land."[2] Beside the music the book printed an origin account credited to J. B. Towe, a second tenor among Hampton's student singers from Blackwater, Virginia, which traces the hymn to a group of enslaved people forbidden to worship within their master's hearing, who sang it in celebration once his widow permitted night meetings in their cabins.[2] That 1874 version runs to five stanzas, each leading back to the call not to grow weary and the promise of a great camp meeting.[2]
Frederic, Lord Leighton, Moses Views the Promised Land, from Dalziels' Bible Gallery, wood engraving, ca. 1862-81. Moses gazing toward the Promised Land, shown for the 1874 heading that promised a great camp meeting there; the engraving has no connection to the song.
Hampton kept the song in its later collections, and the 1909 edition of its plantation songbook still carries Towe's note.[3] In R. Nathaniel Dett's 1927 Hampton collection it appears as "Walk Togedder, Childron," again with Towe's account attached.[4] James Weldon Johnson's preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925) grouped it with "Deep River," "Stand Still Jordan" and others as songs that reach "something akin to majestic grandeur," and offered it as an example of a spiritual whose form had become almost wholly choral.[5]
Hymnary.org lists the spiritual in four hymnals published between 2001 and 2018, among them the African American Heritage Hymnal, in an arrangement by Evelyn Simpson-Curenton.[6] Concert singers still take it up; a 2024 recording by countertenor Michael Walker II uses a setting credited to Moses Hogan and Philip Spray.[7] For dulcimer players, Carol Crocker includes it in Songs Of The Spirit, her sixteen-song collection of African-American spirituals arranged for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning, with lyrics included.[8]
Sources
- Hymnary.org: "Walk together children, don't you get weary".
- Internet Archive: "Hampton and Its Students" (M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow, with songs arranged by Thomas P. Fenner, 1874).
- Internet Archive: "Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, as Sung on the Plantations" (Hampton Institute, 1909).
- Internet Archive: "Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro, as Sung at Hampton Institute" (R. Nathaniel Dett, 1927).
- Internet Archive: "The Book of American Negro Spirituals" (James Weldon Johnson, 1925).
- Hymnary.org: "Walk Together Children" (tune).
- Spirituals Database: "Walk Together Children" (Michael Walker II, 2024).
- Carol Crocker: "Songs Of The Spirit".
- Image: Frederic, Lord Leighton, Moses Views the Promised Land, from Dalziels' Bible Gallery, wood engraving, ca. 1862-81. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.