Let’s Go Tell It On the Mountain
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
December 24, 2023
Good Christmas Eve morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. This morning at the Meetinghouse we are gathering for a Christmas Carol Sing-a-long to begin our Christmas celebration.
The scripture for this morning is Isaiah 52:7 from the New Revised Standard Version.
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
With singing all the Christmas Carols at this time of year, I have realized that there’s something about “that Christmas feeling” that words can’t describe, but the music can capture. There’s a feeling associated with the whole Christmas season, a feeling of warmth, love, and joy that wonderfully counterbalances the frigid December cold. Christmas music captures that feeling with a few beautifully pieced together melodies, harmonies, accompaniment, and (often) lyrics.
Some Christmas songs capture the feeling of old English Christmas caroling with wassail, holly, and mistletoe. Others capture the feeling of that first ever Christmas where shepherds and wise men came to worship at the manger in Bethlehem. Some Christmas carols capture the childlike joy of anticipating Santa’s arrival, opening presents, and playing in the snow. Others capture the feeling of sitting by the fire with a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa. Still others, such as those written during wartime, capture the feeling of appreciating every Christmas as though it is your last. Whatever that Christmas feeling is for you, it is alive in this Meetinghouse this morning.
When I was in high school and undergrad college, at Christmas time, I couldn’t get enough Christmas music. I loved and collected everything from Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas to Amy Grant’s A Christmas Album with a favorite song, Tennessee Christmas on it. But I also loved to pick up rare Christmas albums from Swing to Blues.
One of the rarest albums I own to this day is this album which is titled, “Christmas On the Border: A Spicy Holiday Recipe of Texas Blues, Hot Country, and Mexican Salsa.” It took Christmas music to another entire level. For quite some time it was my go-to Christmas album. I bought the album in 1994 and have it still today as part of my collection.
My favorite song from this unique collection is “Go Tell it on the Mountain” sung by Southern Gospel singer, Greg Gordon. Often when Eric plays his jazzy version at the end of worship, I get sent back to different times in my life playing this album in my dorm room, my car, even at parties where my friends would ask me to bring the CD.
Back then, I just thought “Go Tell it on the Mountain” was one of the classic Christmas songs, but if you do the research that is far from the case. Sadly, the catalogue of classic or traditional Christmas songs is almost unanimously European in origin.
It’s ironically quite far outside the European borders that we find “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
“Go Tell it on the Mountain” is considered in the African American Spiritual or Folk song category, and it has a pretty murky origin. The song likely dates back to the mid-19th century. Yet, you have to remember, African American Spirituals were passed from plantation to plantation orally, disseminating the songs without sheet music, let alone recordings, making them difficult to date accurately.
C Michael Hawn points out that the person responsible for making a Christmas classic out of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is a Nashville-born collector of spirituals named John Wesley Work, Jr.
Work’s life-long love for music started at a young age. His father was the director of their church’s choir. Though Work Jr. studied Latin and history at the historically black college, Fisk University, he ended up organizing singing groups at Fisk.
Work Jr. combined his passions for history and music into his search for African-American spirituals, and with the help of his brother Frederick Jerome Work and wife Agnes Haynes, he compiled their findings and published them in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1901, and New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro in 1907, which actually featured the first publication of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The earliest version of the spiritual appeared in in Religious Folk Songs of The Negro, as Sung on The Plantations, new edition (1909) with the heading “Christmas Plantation Song” with different stanzas and in slave dialect.
Take for instance this verse:
When I was a seeker
I sought both night and day.
I ask de Lord to help me,
An’ He show me de way.
He made me a watchman
Upon the city wall, [a reference to Isaiah 21:11-12]
An’ if I am a Christian
I am the least of all.
Chorus:
Go tell it on de mountain,
Over de hills and everywhere.
Go tell it on de mountain,
Dat Jesus Christ is born.
This is where the importance of the Fisk Jubilee Singers directed by John Wesley Work Jr and his brother Frederick Jerome Work comes into the story. The Fisk Jubilee Singers (which drew their name from Leviticus 25—the year of jubilee) took the entire contents of the University treasury with them on tour for their expenses, they departed on October 6, 1871, from Nashville on their difficult, but ultimately successful eighteen-month tour, a triumph that is still celebrated annually as Jubilee Day on the campus.
Though not the original repertoire of the group, by the time they reached New York in December of that year, their concerts grew to include more and more spirituals, until their program consisted primarily of choral arrangements of spirituals or, according to African American scholars C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, “anthemized spirituals.”
Actually, the Fisk Jubilee Singers have been credited with keeping the Negro spiritual alive.
Spirituals scholar Sandra Jean Graham places this development in context: “The students were at first reluctant ambassadors for the songs of their ancestors. As [Jubilee] singer Ella Sheppard recalled,
“The slave songs were never used by us then in public. They were associated with slavery and the dark past and represented the things to be forgotten. Then, too, they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship…”
It was only through persuasion that the students sang their spirituals privately for the University’s treasurer, George L. White, who was a white man, and through White’s coercion that they sang them in concert.”
Taking the spiritual to white and black audiences in the United States and Europe earned the school and the spiritual an international reputation. The small ensemble of two quartets and a pianist grew to a full choral ensemble. Other historically black colleges eventually followed the same pattern, including Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and Tuskegee Institute (now University in Tuskegee, Alabama).
Folks, this was so important that we even owe the death of blackface and minstrel shows to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, because their performances were the first time many people heard spirituals, having been unaware of their existence before, and the first time many white audiences were exposed to black music actually sung by black people, putting a dent in the whole minstrel-shows-with-white-people-in-blackface thing people were so into at the time.
Talk about taking literal, “Go, tell it on the Mountain” that is exactly how their songs spread across our nation and ultimately the world. Today, almost every hymnal includes “Go, Tell it on the Mountain.”
In an article by Peter Sanfilippo, he tells the rest of the story.
Though the song’s pre-recording success can be credited to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the recorded renditions took on a life of their own.
The first recording by a major singer was from gospel and jazz singer Mahalia Jackson in the 50s, and this version is more or less the one we know today. It has a little gospel swing to it with a little piano and a choir setting the stage for Jackson’s insanely powerful voice.
It was Jesus himself in the synagogue who said,
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[a]
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus exemplified what it meant to “Go, Tell it on the Mountain.”
Proclaim the Good News to the poor
Proclaim freedom to prisoners.
Proclaim recovery of sight to the blind.
And set the oppressed free.
And proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor – or what was known as the year of Jubilee!
This is what John Wesley Work Jr. and the Fisk Jubillee Singers did as they sang across this nation setting the oppressed free, proclaiming freedom with their songs, and working to end the oppression of racisim and misrepresentation.
As Friends/Quakers we too are called this Christmas to go. To go to our places and confront the oppression, to offer freedom, new insights, and Good News. Christmas is our time of Jubilee. Let’s go tell it on the Mountain for all the world to here!
As we enter waiting worship, take a moment to ponder the following queries:
· What Christmas music speaks to my condition, and why?
· Who might I need to go and tell the good news this Christmas?
· What efforts that I am part of help proclaim freedom, recovery of sight, and set the oppressed free?