Christmas Notes: “Go tell it on the mountain”

From the book “Note di Natale” by Davide Pezzi (with a preface by Arturo Stàlteri) published by VoloLibero we publish some of the 95 songs covered by the author in the 300 pages of the volume; we tried to choose the least “predictable”.

Mountains appear continually in the Bible. They may be places where God interacts with people, such as Mount Sinai where God gives Moses the commandments, or where someone with “clean hands and a pure heart” can meet Him, or where a select few disciples can see the transfiguration of Jesus. Or people can shout for joy from the mountaintops. And a mountain can also simply be a place from which to speak, the most famous example being that of
Sermon on the Mount: «Jesus, seeing the crowds, went up the mountain and sat down. His disciples came to him and he began to teach them” (Matthew 5,1-7,29). It is therefore completely normal that in this very famous spiritual it is assumed that the news of the birth of Jesus spread from the mountain tops and hills.

As with most spirituals we do not know who the author is, nor who first sang “Go, Tell It on the Mountain”, it was probably an African American slave. The call-and-response songs of praise that came from this terrible
phase of American history were spread orally, from one plantation and farm to another.

For the story of “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” we have to go back to 1871, in Nashville, Tennessee, today the “capital” of country music. The civil war ended six years ago, and in Nashville, immediately after the end of the conflict, Fisk University, a college for black children, was founded by the American Missionary Association, but the institution is now in serious difficulty
financial. To avoid bankruptcy and the school’s closure, the University’s treasurer and musical director, George Leonard White, a white missionary from the North, assembles a choir of nine students – made up of four men and five women – to go on tour and raise money to save Fisk University. On October 6, 1871, the group of students, joined by a pianist, under the direction of White, began a tour of the United States that would last for 18 months. The first performances were harshly criticized by the press and the public: for black people, despite the end of slavery, things actually hadn’t improved much. “Our strength was failing due to mistreatment in hotels, on railways, poorly attended concerts and ridicule” – recalled one of the singers, Maggie Porter – “There were many times when we had no place to sleep or anything to eat. Mr. White would come out and bring us sandwiches and try to find a place to put us up.”

To try to attract the public’s attention, the boys accept White’s invitation to find an appropriate name for the choir. In memory of the Jubilee described in the book of Leviticus in the Bible, in which every fiftieth Pentecost is followed by a “jubilee year”, in which all slaves would be freed, the group takes the name of Jubilee Singers, also because the
Most Fisk University students and their families were newly freed slaves. The concert repertoire also changes as the tour progresses; initially, in fact, the boys are reluctant to sing the slaves’ songs. «They were associated with slavery and the dark past and represented things to be forgotten” – said one of the choir’s singers, Ella Sheppard – “They were also sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious cults. It was only after many months that our hearts gradually opened and we began to appreciate the wonderful beauty and power of our songs.”

The change occurs three days before Christmas: the choir is short of funds and discouraged, when the most famous preacher of the time, Henry Ward Beecher, invites them to his church. They begin to sing the songs of their hearts, the spirituals they had learned from their parents during the days of slavery. And the rich congregation responds enthusiastically and moved with tears… and donations. The Fisk Jubilee Singers are credited with first popularizing the black spiritual tradition among white, Northern audiences, who were unaware of its existence in the late 19th century. They were instrumental in preserving this American musical tradition, known today as Negro Spirituals (a term that today may seem offensive in Italy but which is commonly used in all official sites dedicated to spirituals and gospel music) and broke racial barriers in the United States and abroad in the late 19th century. After a difficult start, the tour reaches its climax
peak when the group was invited to perform for President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House in March 1872, and by the time they returned to Nashville they had raised the $20,000 needed to save their university.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers continued to perform afterward, toured England to great acclaim, performing in front of Queen Victoria in 1873, and – think – they still exist today! Their concerts were the first time most Americans heard “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” which quickly became an audience favorite. The first known publication of the song is credited to John Wesley Work, Jr., who included it in the 1901 collection “New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers”. Work is a really interesting character: he was born in 1872, so not long after the end of the Civil War, and his father was a former slave who became a church choir director in Nashville. Work attended Fisk University and earned a master’s degree in Latin from Harvard University, after which he returned to Nashville and taught Latin, Greek and history at the same institution from which he graduated. But his true passion is music: he passionately dedicates himself to researching and transcribing the texts of many spirituals, which is quite difficult as these songs were passed down orally. Work only writes the lyrics to “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” as the melody is certainly traditional. In 1899 he became director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, in which he already sang as a tenor, a role he held until 1923.

The song would go through several revisions and adjustments over the years, before arriving at the form we know today, eventually becoming one of the major African-American contributions to the telling of the Christmas story, a song that is sung around the world today. The first credited recording is that of 1942 by Dorothy Mainor, a soprano of
founding color of the Harlem School of the Arts, after which there were more than 500 recordings, including those by Mahalia Jackson, Frank Sinatra, Lee Patterson Singers, Dolly Parton and others, but a noteworthy version is the folk version by Simon & Garfunkel, included in their first album “Wednesday Morning, 3 AM”, with passion and involvement, despite being
both Jewish, and although “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” is such a deeply Christian hymn and linked to the birth of Jesus.