We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder: A Song History

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“We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder” is an anonymous African American spiritual, catalogued by Hymnary.org with Jacob's dream in Genesis 28, where a stairway joins earth and heaven, among its scriptural sources.[1] Its origins are unknown, and a history of the song from the United Methodist Church's Discipleship Ministries observes that the span of 1750 to 1875 sometimes given for it rests on no documentation.[2] That history weighs two speculative theories: folklorist Alan Lomax held, without evidence, that the song began in white tradition and was soon reshaped by Black singers, while historian Miles Mark Fisher linked ladder imagery in spirituals to early nineteenth-century efforts to resettle African Americans in Liberia, placing it around 1824–25.[2] Scholar John Lovell Jr. saw in the climb the deep wish of enslaved people to rise after long subjugation.[2]

Small etching of Jacob asleep on the ground while angels climb and descend a ladder that reaches into a burst of light

Rembrandt, Jacob's Ladder, 1655, etching, engraving and drypoint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

As far as that history records, the song did not reach print until the twentieth century. It names the second edition of Emily Hallowell's Calhoun Plantation Songs (Boston, 1907), taken down from students living at Alabama's Calhoun Colored School, as the earliest printed source; Thomas Fenner, choral director at Hampton Institute, printed it in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro in 1909, and that same year the gospel publisher Charles Davis Tillman recast it in quartet style with an added refrain in Tabernacle Songs.[2] Hymnary.org traces it through 129 hymnals, the oldest it indexes being the American Student Hymnal of 1928.[1]

Paul Robeson often programmed the spiritual, and it is the final track on the LP of his Carnegie Hall concert of May 9, 1958, with Alan Booth at the piano.[2][3] Pete Seeger sang a variant of it in 1968, during the civil-rights protest years, and Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock sings an unaccompanied version, with leader and chorus trading lines, in Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War (1990).[2] Bruce Springsteen recorded it as “Jacob's Ladder” on We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006), his album of traditional songs that Seeger had popularized.[4] Mountain dulcimer players will find it in Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam: Gospel Edition.[5]

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Sources

  1. Hymnary.org: "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder".
  2. Discipleship Ministries (United Methodist Church): "History of Hymns: 'We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder'".
  3. Smithsonian Institution: "Paul Robeson at Carnegie Hall [sound recording]".
  4. BruceSpringsteen.net: "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions".
  5. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam Gospel Edition".