Back to: The Twelve Days of Christmas Carols
John Wesley Work was an African American church choir director in Nashville, Tennessee. 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. The Work family saved hundreds of Negro spirituals from extinction.
John Wesley Work, Jr.
His son John Wesley Work, Jr. (1872?-1925) received his master’s degree from Fisk University, and after further study at Harvard, began teaching Latin and Greek at the university in 1898. He trained the Jubilee Singers and was a leader in preserving and performing African American spirituals. John along with his brother Frederick Jerome Work (1878? -1942), led the Fisk Jubilee Singers from 1898-1904.
John Work taught at Fisk University until 1923 when he was relieved of his duties due to changing attitudes toward the spiritual. He then went on to be President of Roger Williams University in Nashville until his death in 1925. Work became the first African-American collector of Negro spirituals.
In Work’s choir were several members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers from the nearby black college of the same name. The Fisk Jubilee Singers (drawing their name from Leviticus 25—the year of jubilee) were founded as a ten-member touring ensemble to raise funds for debt-ridden Fisk University. The small ensemble of two quartets and a pianist grew to a full choral ensemble
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. Though not the original repertoire of the group 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.”
They 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.”
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. They became a monumental force in first exposing the musical talents of African Americans.
Work and his brother Frederick Jerome Work (1879-1942) were devoted to collecting, arranging, and publishing African American slave songs and spirituals. This actually was a difficult task for Work as they were passed down verbally, from plantation to plantation; very few were ever written down. On one notable collecting trip in the early 1940s he recorded a then-unknown blues artist who went by the name of Muddy Waters
They published two collections: New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1901) and Folk Songs of the American Negro (1907). It was in this second volume that “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” first appeared.
“Go Tell It on the Mountain,” had come from the fields of the South, born from the inspiration of a slave’s Christmas. The spiritual probably dates from the early 1800s, was first popularized in 1879 by the Fisk University Jubilee Singers. To black slaves in the United States, the birth of a Savior who would set all men free was a miracle to be sung about. And when there was something so notable to tell, what better place to tell it from than a mountain, just as Jesus had chosen for His Sermon on the Mount.
Few had been written about Christmas but this song embraced the wonder of lowly shepherds touched by God at the very first Christmas. The shepherds were found inspiration in visiting Jesus, the powerful light of heaven shining down on them. They clearly identified with the lowly station of he shepherd who found grace that first Christmas
John II and his brothers Frederick kept the basic melody but arranged 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. In 1909, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” was published in Thomas P. Fenner’s book Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations. The song appeared with the heading “Christmas Plantation Song” with different stanzas and in slave dialect.
John Wesley Work, III.
John Wesley Work III (1901-1967), a graduate of Julliard, was the third-generation member of the Work family and continued to uncover and save unknown spirituals, many times traveling hundreds of miles to seek out elderly slaves who had sung them in the fields. John Work III devoted years of his life documenting this important facet of American culture.
In the midst of the Great Depression, Work took another look at what his uncle and father had done with “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” Using their notes and arrangements as well as the materials he had dug up through interviews and research, he took the old song and reworked it one more time, adding a new arrangement and at least one new stanza. John Work III’s arrangement—the one we know today—was published in American Negro Songs and Spirituals in 1940.