Every Time I Feel the Spirit

I. Background

The earliest known performance of the song was attested by a woman named “Aunt” Mary Dines, an escaped slave from Maryland who for a time served as the Lincoln family’s private cook and also cooked for displaced slaves at Camp Barker, which was along one of Abraham Lincoln’s routes into and out of Washington, D.C. At one point during the Civil War (1861–1865), President and Mrs. Lincoln were treated to a performance by the residents, including “Nobody knows what I trouble I see, but Jesus,” “Every time I feel the Spirit,” and “John Brown’s Body.” According to Dines, the President was moved to tears and returned again on another day to hear more singing. A photograph often associated with that encampment and that event—sometimes credited to Matthew Brady, and according to some sources, kept by Dines as a memento—shows several people lined up holding books (Fig. 1).[1] According to the Library of Congress, the structures also resemble and possibly depict Freedman’s Village, an encampment in Arlington, Virginia. Either way, it captures the living conditions of freed slaves near Washington, D.C., a scene Abraham Lincoln would have recognized.

In spite of the early recollection from a former slave, no published trace of the song was made over the next forty years.

II. Publication History

This African-American spiritual was first published in Folk Songs of the American Negro (1907 | Fig. 2), a collection edited by brothers John W. Work II (1872–1925) and Frederick J. Work (1878–1942), both of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In the preface, the J.W. Work did not explain exactly how the songs had been gathered. He only reported, “These songs are still being hunted and found. We think there are in this little book some songs that have not been generally known save in certain small localities.”

This arrangement features the refrain in four-part harmony, unaccompanied, with three stanzas to be sung by a soloist while the group hums in harmony. The three stanzas refer to the person and work of Jesus, who hears prayers, who died for sinners on a cross (for Jews and Gentiles alike), who is the Son of David, Lord of all, and King of heaven. The refrain is sometimes associated with Romans 8:26 (“the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words”). The indication “Infervorato” means “Fervently.” The same arrangement appeared much later in American Negro Songs and Spirituals (1940), p. 156, edited by John W. Work III (1901–1967), who from a young age heard his father and the Fisk Jubilee Singers sing it.

Two years after the first printing at Fisk, it was published through the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (later Hampton University) in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro (1909 | Fig. 3), edited by Robert R. Moton (1867–1940), commandant of the school and music director. Although many of the newer songs in this collection (the ones not previously included in Cabin and Plantation Songs, 1901) were borrowed from other black schools like Fisk University and the Penn School at St. Helena Island, South Carolina, this song was not marked as such, thus its provenance is unclear.

In this example, the refrain is in four-part harmony. The shape of the melody is different here than what was printed as Fisk, but it is still recognizable as the same song. This version has three solo stanzas, different from the ones at Fisk textually and melodically. These stanzas include a reference to Moses on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments (Ex. 9:18), a possible reference to Eden (Gen. 1:26–30), and the Jordan River (Mt. 3:6, Mk. 1:5).

Esteemed ethnomusicologist Natalie Curtis Burlin (1875–1921) came to Hampton in 1904, initially devoting her time to working with Native American students in relation to her project The Indians’ Book (1907). Starting in 1910, she also became involved in studying the culture of the African American students. Her musical research culminated in four small volumes of Negro Folk Songs (1918–1919 | Fig. 4). The second volume contains a careful transcription of “O ev’ry time I feel de Spirit.” In this case, Burlin recorded the names of the singers, all from Virginia. Her description of the affect of the song gives some sense of how the song was performed:

Of all the spirituals, this is one of the most touching in its prayerful suggestion and quiet reverence, and in the poetic imagery of its verse, couched in a few crude words, elemental in their simplicity, yet somehow conveying the grandeur of the vision of God on the mountain-top and the dazed soul beholding heaven in wonder.

Part of her process included a deliberate annotation of the pronunciation. The stanzas here are the same as they had been printed in 1909, but in a different order.

Fig. 4. Negro Folk Songs, Book 2 (NY: G. Schirmer, 1918). Melody in the Lead part.

In her explication of the textual emphasis and pronunciation, she mentioned the performance practice at St. Helena Island, a place she is known to have visited for her research. The gathering of spirituals at the Penn School happened relatively late, eventually published as Saint Helena Island Spirituals (1925 | Fig. 5). In that collection, the dialect was presented differently than in the previous publications. The solo stanzas are consistent with what was known at Hampton, plus an additional stanza about a metaphorical train to heaven. The heading includes a cross reference to the 1909 Hampton collection (Fig. 3).

One other example worth noting is a transcription of the song, words only, made by A.E. Perkins for an article, “Negro spirituals from the far south,” in The Journal of American Folk-lore, vol. 35 (1922). Perkins provided no details about where he heard the song, but his account is interesting for providing stanzas not otherwise found in other sources, referencing the crossing of the Red Sea (Ex. 14) and white robes (Rev. 7).

After these initial publications, the song gained wider exposure through two different channels. In the concert hall, it was arranged for solo voice and piano and also for mixed choirs by Harry T. Burleigh in 1925, later included in the Album of Negro Spirituals (1928), and likewise for voice and piano by J. Rosamond Johnson in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925). In songbooks for congregational singing, it was reportedly included in a songbook edited by C.M. Alexander, the National Baptist Convention Hymnal (1919), but no copies of this appear to survive. It was given in Gems of Love (1924), a songbook edited by Edward C. Deas, but otherwise did not gain traction in the hymnal market until the 1950s.

Presbyterian hymnals (PCUSA) use an arrangement by Joseph T. Jones (1902–1983) from Great Day: Negro Spirituals (1961), adapted by Melva Wilson Costen for The Presbyterian Hymnal (1990). The assignment of the tune name PENTECOST was made by the editors of the United Methodist Hymnal (1989), who used an arrangement by William Farley Smith.

III. Early Recordings

The earliest recordings of the song date to the 1920s. The first was made by the Morehouse College Quartet (Atlanta, GA) for OKeh records in June 1923 (OKeh 40268-B). This has not been reissued digitally.

In March 1925, the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette recorded it for Paramount (12268) in New York City. The group consisted of J. “Buddie” Archer, Otto Tutson, Delrose Hollins, and Len Williams, unaccompanied. This was reissued by Document Records on Norfolk Jazz and Jubilee Quartets, Vol. 2 (DOCD-5382). In this example, some of the words are difficult to decipher, but it seems to draw from some of the stanzas shown above, plus some others not previously published. The style is rhythmic in a moderate tempo, with some independence and elaboration among the parts, especially in the bass.

In September 1925, it was recorded by Mme. C. Mae Frierson Moore and the Four Aces of Harmony, a male vocal group, accompanied by piano, for Paramount (12323) in Chicago. This was reissued by Document Records on Church Choirs, Gospel Singers and Preachers, Vol. 2 (DOCD-5589). This example follows the Fisk version (Fig. 2). The group sang the refrain rhythmically but the stanzas were rendered more slowly and smoothly.

On 20 January 1926, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers made their first recording of it for Columbia (562-D) in New York City. The group consisted of Mr. and Mrs. James A. Myers, Carl Barbour, Horatio O’Bannon, and Ludie David Collins, unaccompanied. This was reissued by Document Records on Fisk Jubilee Singers, Vol. 3 (DOCD-5535). Curiously, this rendition more closely resembles the version published by Hampton (Fig. 3) than the one published by their own school.

The song was recorded at least eight more times through the end of the 1920s, and many more times since. One of the more notable later recordings was made by Marian Anderson (1897–1993) for Victor (2032-B) in 1938, using an arrangement by Lawrence Brown.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
18 June 2021

Footnotes:

1. The account by Dines was preserved by John E. Washington in They Knew Lincoln (New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1942), pp. 84–87. See also the Library of Congress, “Freedman's Village, Arlington”: https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645761/, and Matthew Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (Oxford: University Press, 2003), pp. 67–68, 212–213.

Related Resources:

Edith Armstrong Talbot, “True religion in Negro hymns,” Southern Workman, vol. 51, no. 5 (May 1922), pp. 213–216: HathiTrust

LindaJo H. McKim, “Every time I feel the Spirit,” The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), p. 224.

Carlton R. Young, “Every time I feel the Spirit,” Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), pp. 327–328.

Robert M.W. Dixon, et al., Blues & Gospel Records, 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford: University Press, 1997).

Gwendolyn Sims Warren, “Ev’ry Time I Feel de Spirit,” Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit (NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1997), pp. 31–32.

Carl P. Daw Jr., “Every time I feel the Spirit,” Glory to God: A Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), pp. 66–67.

“Every time I feel the Spirit,” Hymnary.org: https://hymnary.org/text/upon_the_mountain_when_my_lord_spoke