When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder: A Song History
“When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” is a gospel song with both text and tune by James Milton Black (1856–1938), dated 1893 by Hymnary.org, which names the tune ROLL CALL and lists it as public domain.[1] Black, born in South Hill, New York, spent his working life in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, as a Sunday school teacher, choir leader and composer at Pine Tree Methodist Episcopal Church; he edited about a dozen gospel songbooks, wrote close to 1,500 songs, and sat on the commission behind the 1905 Methodist hymnal.[2] The song pictures the faithful answering a final heavenly roll call, and Hymnary.org ties it to passages in 1 Thessalonians and Revelation.[1]
Albrecht Dürer, Seven Angels with Trumpets, from the Apocalypse, 1511 edition, woodcut. Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).
The song’s traditional origin story, as told in a Christianity.com devotional piece, runs like this: a poor fourteen-year-old girl Black had invited to his Sunday school failed to answer at roll call, he found her at home gravely ill with pneumonia, and, finding no existing song that suited the idea of a heavenly roll, he wrote one himself.[3] Hymnary.org’s pages on the text and on Black do not tell this story, and none of the sources consulted here documents it independently, so it is best read as tradition rather than established fact.[1][2] Whatever its spark, the piece spread widely: Hymnary.org counts it in more than 500 hymnals, far more than any other of Black’s texts it indexes.[1][2]
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