Read Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas for Free Online Page A

inspirational lessons in song forgotten, as were the testimonies they contained. Perhaps all of them would have been gonehad it not been for a very special American family and the dynamic voices of a college choir.
    Not long after the Civil War, a man named John Wesley Work was an African American church choir director in Nashville, Tennessee. A scholar as well as a musician, Work had a deep interest in music that defined the experience of the Negro in America. One of the few educated African Americans in the South, Work felt the new generation of black southerners might best understand the importance of spirituality by learning the songs their ancestors sang during the days of slavery.
    In Work’s choir were several members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from the nearby black college of the same name. As Work influenced the Jubilee Singers with his thoughts and music, the singers would pass that influence to the world through their uplifting arrangements of Negro spirituals. During an era when few Negroes were able to travel more than a few miles from their birthplace, the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured the world, appearing in England before Queen Victoria and at the White House in front of President Chester Arthur. Their music revealed a passion for life and living that few people had ever experienced, and they became a monumental force in first exposing the musical talents of African Americans.
    John Work passed his love of music and history onto his son, John Wesley Work II. The latter became a folk singer, composer, and collector of Negro spirituals, and, eventually, a professor of history and Latin at Fisk College. His wife was the music teacher for the Jubilee Singers. Along with Work’s brother, Frederick, this second generation of Works kept the flame of spiritual music burning brightly and saved a huge number of Negro folk songs from being lost or forgotten.
    There will always be some debate over who first uncovered the song “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” but Frederick Work wasone of the first to note the song’s power and potential. The song had come from the fields of the South, born from the inspiration of a slave’s Christmas, and it was unique in that, of the hundreds of Negro spirituals the Work family saved from extinction, few had been written about Christmas. Most, as would seem only natural, centered on earthly pain and suffering, and the joy and happiness that only heaven seemed to offer. Yet here, standing against the backdrop of such haunting spirituals as “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” was “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a triumphant piece that embraced the wonder of lowly shepherds touched by God at the very first Christmas.
    When I was a seeker
    I sought both night and day,
    I asked the Lord to help me,
    And he showed me the way.
    Chorus:
    Go tell it on the mountain,
    Over the hills and everywhere,
    Go tell it on the mountain,
    Our Jesus Christ is born.
    He made me a watchman
    Upon a city wall,
    And if I am a Christian,
    I am the least of all.
    Chorus
    When I was a seeker
    I sought both night and day,
    I asked the Lord to help me,
    And he showed me the way.
    Chorus
    John II and Frederick studied the words and the basic melody to “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Not wanting to change the dramatic impact of the song’s lyrics, they left them intact, but the brothers did rearrange the music into an anthem-like structure that would suit choirs such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Beginning in the 1880s, that group took the song to the world.

    As the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced the song to the people throughout this country and beyond, many compared the melody to two other Civil War songs, “We’ll March Around Jerusalem” and “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching.” The Work brothers might have been influenced by both of these folk songs, but neither of them could come close to the message and the power of the words that sprang from a lowly slave’s heart. With no hope