Go, Tell It on the Mountain

About this hymn

Words

African American spiritual, 19th century; stanzas attributed to John W. Work Jr. (1872-1925)

Music

GO TELL IT, African American spiritual, 19th century

Meter

7.6.7.6 with refrain

In

132 hymnals

Scripture

Luke 2:1-20, Isaiah 52:7, Matthew 28:19-20

The story

This is a spiritual. It moved by voice and memory before anyone put it on paper, and no composer of the original is known. The printing history is tangled. Different sources point to 1901, 1907 and 1909, so the honest way to say it is that it was first printed in the early 1900s. Hymnary indexes it under the stanza, While shepherds kept their watching, not under the refrain everybody knows. There is also a Fisk tradition of students singing it before dawn on Christmas morning. The words work on two levels at once, the shepherds carrying news down the hill and the church carrying it now, which is part of why it has stayed alive outside hymnals as much as in them.

This is an African American spiritual, carried orally in the Black church long before it was collected and printed. John Wesley Work Jr., described as the first African American collector of spirituals, taught at Fisk University and directed the Jubilee Singers, and the stanzas we sing are attributed to him, with his son John Wesley Work III later making the arrangements that spread it widely. Be careful here: who wrote which verse is not settled, and the sources use the family's Sr., Jr., II and III labels inconsistently.

A note on the music: The melody and the old verses are free to use, but modern hymnal harmonizations of this one are under copyright, so work the chart out by ear instead of copying a printed arrangement.

Where it fits in a service

Often used on Christmas Sunday and at Christmas Eve, and it also serves as a sending song since the refrain is a commission. Choirs and youth groups pick it up easily.