One of the most unique American contributions to the body of Christian hymnody is the African-American spiritual. As terrible as was the experience of 18th and 19th century slavery, out of that came the passionate gospel hymnody of these spirituals. The message of the gospel was embraced widely and deeply by slaves in the United States. In some places, slaves were even evangelized by their masters and permitted to join in the worship of white congregations, though often only from the rear balcony. In other places, black families formed their own separate congregations, with buildings in the area of their residential cabins. These spirituals are a form of folk music, in that we don’t know the names of authors or specific circumstances of their composition. They arose during the 18th and 19th centuries in the communal slave experience.
The hardships of slavery in the 19th century produced these songs that embodied true evangelical faith in Jesus, joined with a longing for freedom. While the system of slavery was terribly unjust and cruel, many of those captured in its bondage did come to genuine trust and faith in Jesus as Savior of sinners. The language of the spirituals often reflected a longing for heaven, a crossing over Jordan, similar to the Israelites in their freedom from bondage to Egyptian slavery, a time when there would be no more separation from loved ones, no more suffering and death, and the only master would be Jesus.
But the hunger for freedom that resides in every human heart found expression in songs that looked to God for consolation. Often we find lyrics that speak of crossing the Jordan (death) into the Promised Land (heaven). A good example is “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin’ for to Carry Me Home.” In the midst of pain and sorrow, believing hearts in the slave camps reached out to Jesus for comfort, and that comes through powerfully in these spirituals. Without understanding the slavery context, almost all white congregations in the 20th century included these songs in their hymnals and have sung them throughout the year. These spirituals included “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” “Deep River,” “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” and “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” There is an emotional intensity in the texts, of hurting people crying out to the Lord to sustain and deliver them.
The cross of Jesus is one of the most common themes in the African-American spirituals. For African Americans, this remembering of the cross allowed them to claim the Christ who knew their suffering and stood in solidarity with their oppression. As one hymnologist notes, “In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.” The spiritual thus connected the suffering of Christ to the suffering of the African-American community, with its inherent promise of God’s presence and resurrection power.
While black slaves were evangelized and sometimes permitted to sit in the balconies of white congregations for worship, they also gathered among themselves for times of praying, teaching, and singing. It was likely in these gatherings, with their own preachers, that they composed and sang their own songs. These black preachers developed a style of preaching in which they would often break off in the middle of a sermon to sing, sometimes extemporizing, adding stanzas to a familiar selection, and even preaching in a “sing-song” style. The lyrics were simple and repetitious so that all could join in.
Many today are familiar with such spirituals as “Deep River,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” One of the best-known of these spirituals is “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” which is today found in every major hymnal of the last thirty years. It included the four stanzas looking at the cross. The fifth stanza about the resurrection was added in the 20th century by modern hymnal editors. The earliest known printed version of this anonymous song is found in a collection called “Old Plantation Hymns,” published in 1899. Compiled by William Eleazar Barton (1861-1930). It was found again with additional words in 1907 in “Folk Songs of the American Negro” by John Wesley Work, Jr. (1872-1925). He was an ethnomusicologist who, with his father before him and his son afterward, hunted down and sought to preserve the music of American slave culture.
John Work’s father directed a church choir, some of whose members were in the original Fisk University Jubilee Singers, whose concerts across American and Europe familiarized the public with this rich source of Christian song. John was educated at Fisk University, a historic Black university in Nashville, TN, founded just six months after the US Civil War. He went on to attend Harvard University, returning to Fisk as a Latin and history instructor in 1904, while training the Jubilee Singers. He also established the music publishing company, Work Brothers and Hart. Fifty years ago, spirituals such as this were largely used as fun songs at banquets, parties, and community singings. Only in more recent decades have they been found in hymnbooks used by white congregations where their distinctive characteristics have added a rich and rewarding dimension to worship.
“Were You There?” is perhaps the best-known and widely-sung of them. Many arrangements of both words and music have been made. John Wesley Work, Jr. resigned his post at Fisk in 1923 and then served as president of Roger Williams University in Nashville, until his death there on September 7, 1925. He and his wife had six children, of whom John Wesley Work III (1901-67) also worked as the director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and as a song collector and composer who edited a comprehensive collection of 230 African-American folk songs, religious and secular, in 1940.
The stanzas of this song ask a series of rhetorical questions in the form of “anamnesis.” That is a Greek word that means to remember. Obviously, none of us were literally there on Calvary’s hill when these things happened, but in considering the questions, we can take our place there by faith as eyewitnesses pondering what this should mean to us today. We find this principle in Moses’ instructions to succeeding generations after the Passover event, “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.” (Deuteronomy 5:3) And it is still done today when Jewish families proclaim at their Passover Seder, “We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out.” We do a similar thing at the Lord’s Supper when, as Jesus instructed us, “This do in remembrance of Me.”
During Holy Week, many will make use of “Were You There,” one of the most prominent and popular of these spirituals. It will be found in virtually every hymnal published in the last century. Its first published version came in 1899 in William E. Barton’s “Old Plantation Songs” in the section “Recent Negro Melodies.” There, it included four stanzas: 1) Were you there when they crucified my Lord?; 2) …when they nailed Him to the cross?; 3) …when they pierced Him in the side?; 4) …when the sun refused to shine. Since the late 20th century, many other songbooks include a fifth: “…when they laid Him in the tomb,” and even a sixth: “… when He rose up from the dead.”
David Bjorlin has written this very helpful explanation of the hymn on the United Methodist Church’s Discipleship Ministries website:
The series of questions that forms the basis of the song is obviously not meant to be taken literally; none of us were physically present at the passion of Christ. Rather, the questions are meant to function as a form of “anamnesis.” From the Greek, anamnesis literally means to remember. Yet, it is much more than simple mental recall of an event. It calls the community to remember the past to the present, to bring these historic events to bear on the now and make them part of our story. When Moses tells the second generation of Hebrew people about to enter the promised land, “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today,” it is anamnesis; when Jews continue to proclaim at the Passover Seder, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord our God took us out,” it is anamnesis; and when the Christian community celebrates the Lord’s Supper “in remembrance” (and the Greek word here is anamnesis!) of Christ, it is anamnesis. “Were You There” is then an anamnetic song that is meant to bring the past events of Christ’s suffering and death into the present and transform us in its light.
Yet, if our anamnetic exercise only includes Christ’s passion, it is incomplete. The song also calls us to re-member the African-American slave experience out of which the song arose. As James Cone notes in “The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” the cross is central to the African-American experience: “During my childhood, I heard a lot about the cross at Macedonia A.M.E. Church, where faith in Jesus was defined and celebrated. We sang about ‘Calvary,’ and asked, ‘Were you there?’, ‘down at the cross,’ ‘when they crucified my Lord.’ ‘Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.’…There were more songs, sermons, prayers, and testimonies about the cross than any other theme. The cross was the foundation on which their faith was built.”
For African Americans, this remembering of the cross allowed them to claim the Christ who knew their suffering and stood in solidarity with their oppression. Again, Cone notes, “In the mystery of God’s revelation, black Christians believed that just knowing that Jesus went through an experience of suffering in a manner similar to theirs gave them faith that God was with them, even in suffering on lynching trees, just as God was present with Jesus in suffering on the cross.” The spiritual thus remembered the suffering of Christ to the suffering of the African-American community, with its inherent promise of God’s presence and resurrection power.
Yet, like any hymn or song that has achieved such prominence, the message of “Were You There” quickly expanded beyond its initial context. African American pastor, author, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman gives one poignant example in his memoir, “With Head and Heart.” On a trip to India, he and his wife, Sue, had the honor of meeting with Mahatma Gandhi. After a wonderful conversation, the talk took a surprising turn as the Thurmans prepared to leave. Thurman notes, “But before we left, he asked, ‘Will you do me a favor? Will you sing one of your songs for me? Will you sing “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”’ He continued, ‘I feel that this song gets to the root of the experience of the entire human race under the spread of the healing wings of suffering.’”While the story could be told simply to marvel at the image of Howard and Sue Thurman singing “Were You There?” with Gandhi in his ashram tent, it also shows the power and affect of the spiritual. And while the influence of Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the burgeoning Civil Rights movement has been well documented, perhaps we see here how the influence was reciprocal, as this song borne from the crucible of suffering spoke to any and all around the world who faced oppressions of every kind.
Since this song arose and was passed along through oral tradition, there is no “authentic” version. It is not surprising, then, that over the years, a few additional stanzas as noted above have been added and included in hymnals. These reflect other dimensions of what occurred on that first Good Friday. A final stanza about Jesus rising up from the dead was almost certainly a later addition to carry the story through to Easter morning.
The repeated question “Were you there?” challenges singers to make this personal. It challenges the singer to imagine himself/herself actually present when these events took place, seeing and hearing as Jesus was experiencing each of these moments. And if the singers had been able to be there, it surely would have caused them to tremble, as the lyrics cause one to sing that word repeatedly. Hopefully, the trembling would not be merely the reaction to the pain that would have been experienced by the suffering Savior, but also trembling in amazement that He would do that for sinners like us.
Each stanza follows the events of Good Friday:
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?
Were you there when they pierced Him in the side?
Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb?
For a population unable to read, and dependent on the biblical stories being told over and over, this was a wonderful way to teach the narrative of Jesus’ passion.
Each stanza then ends with a chorus:
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble!
What an appropriate response to this work at Calvary! We tremble in amazement over what He was willing to do for us. We tremble at the pain He experienced as our substitute. And we tremble with shame when we realize that it was our sin that made this necessary!
And then more recently hymnal editors have added a fifth stanza to bring the story to a more joyful conclusion at the resurrection.
Were you there when He rose up from the dead?
With a different chorus to reflect the celebration of Jesus’ victory over death.
Sometimes I feel like shouting glory! glory! glory!
In some versions today, we find these as alternative texts for stanzas 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Were you there when the sun refused to shine?
Were you there when He bore your sins and mine?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble!
Were you there when they gave Him gall and wine?
Were you there when they pierced Him with a spear?
Were you there when “Forgive them” God did hear?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble!
Were you there when His death was drawing near?
Were you there when they laid Him in the tomb?
Were you there when they sealed Him in the gloom?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble!
Were you there when they thought they’d brought His doom?
Were you there when He rose up from the grave?
Were you there when He showed his power to save?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble!
Were you there when He walked out of the cave?
What stands out so powerfully is the challenge to realize that, “Yes! We were there,” since it was for us that He died. That’s the “take away” that should connect us to the Savior’s love as we sing.
Here’s a powerful rendition of the spiritual.