This is gonna take Q or Joe or Jim.

Or Masato Sakurai. I know it's not in my collection of thousands of gospel songs and/or spirituals.

Or-- if I could hear the song I'd be able to make an educated guess about its possible origins as a spiritual. There were a good many that never made it into print, that surfaced at one point or another into commercial culture as memories from songs an elder had sung that had been passed down through generations from slave times. Equally possible is that it was a "created" song, that came into being well after slave times-- that had been inspired by the textual patterns or tonality of spirituals.

And there is no way of knowing if it is either or both, for sure.

A lot of black gospel came into being via improvisation and was never written or formally arranged, but was just "around" among the number of musicians needed to cut a track. From there, many songs circulated around in various forms among church and concert artists until MAYBE someone claimed copyright at some point in its development.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just ask Mahalia? Unfortunately, artists' accounts of song sources can be somewhat apocryphal, or composited, or misremembered. If you found an old intereview where she told all about it-- it might only be a story she decided should be told, a sort of sermon if you will.

It's tantalizing to know there are several recordings by the same name. We just can't know, at this point, if they are the same song and, if so, who heard whom do it (when), and learned it, and folk-processed it into their own simlar or very different version. That kinda is one of the main hallmarks of gospel music, go figure. :~)

Another hallmark of gospel is that one gets to just enjoy it, and not worry too much about all that provenance stuff. :~) Sometimes the only answer we can find is going to lead to, "I don't know, but someday I might learn more." There have been stories of singers doing songs with that kind of intro, and having someone come along eventually who can add some ideas about the song. We had a thread up just last week, about that, from the Steve Miller band song including a phrase about the Pompitous of Love.

Music can be..... so messy. Messy is not alwasy bad! :~)

~Susan