“Go Tell It on the Mountain” is one of the most well-known and beloved Negro spirituals and represents just one of the countless contributions made to American music by enslaved people. These songs represented a passion for life and living despite the suffering, humiliation, and unimaginable cruelty of slavery.
Because most slaves were uneducated, these songs were passed along through a vibrant and rich oral tradition and were eventually captured and written down by one special American family. Not long after the Civil War, John Wesley Work, a Black choir director in Nashville, Tennessee, began a mission to write down melodies and lyrics of these well-known songs, often traveling hundreds of miles to seek former slaves who had sung this and other songs while they labored.
Work’s passion for the music and history of these plantations songs was passed on to his son, John Wesley Work II, whose wife was the music teacher at nearby Fisk University, one of the first universities for Blacks in the south. Beginning in 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers went on tour introducing the world to the genre of Negro spirituals while raising funds to keep the doors of their school open. Before long, their repertoire of uplifting spirituals not only saved their university but earned them world-wide recognition including notable audiences with President Chester Arthur and Queen Victoria.
During the Great Depression, John Work III, also embraced his family’s passion for preserving old Negro spirituals and took special interest in “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Through his own interviews and research, he changed the arrangement and added a stanza. In 1940, he published his rendition in his book American Negro Songs and Spirituals and is the version we know today.
Although the creators of spirituals like “Go Tell It on the Mountain” will forever remain anonymous, the Work family and the Fisk University Jubilee Singers have played an important role in preserving and popularizing this uniquely American genre of music.
