Go Tell It on the Mountain — Decades of Struggle, a Dedicated Bookworm, and University
Unknown — Mid 19th Century
The catalogue of classic or traditional Christmas songs is almost unanimously European in origin. This also includes several of the American classics, with those writers coming from European descent, so it’s particularly exciting to come by a lively Christmas with a different kind of story behind it. It’s outside the European borders that we find “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
Like many spirituals and folk songs, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” has a pretty murky origin. The song likely dates back to the mid-19th century, but spirituals were passed from plantation to plantation orally, disseminating the songs without sheet music, let alone recordings, making them difficult to date accurately. The person responsible for making a Christmas classic out of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is a Nashville-born collector of spirituals named John Wesley Work, Jr.
Work’s life-long love for music started at a young age. His father was the director of their church’s choir, and though Work Jr. studied Latin and history at Fisk University, he organized singing groups as well.
He combined his passions for history and music into his search for African-American spirituals, and with the help of his brother Frederick Jerome Work and wife Agnes Haynes, he compiled their findings and published them in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1901, and New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro in 1907, which featured the first publication of “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
This is where the importance of the Fisk Jubilee Singers comes in. The school’s a cappella ensemble would tour across the United States to fundraise for the college, a tradition Fisk University continues today. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were hugely important to the dissemination of spirituals and African American folk music to white audiences in the 19th century.
These performances were the first time many people heard spirituals, having been unaware of their existence before, and the first time many white audiences were exposed to black music actually sung by black people, putting a dent in the whole minstrel-shows-with-white-dudes-in-blackface thing people were so into. Among many other now-famous spirituals popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” became popular and with time, a Christmas staple.
Though the song’s pre-recording success can be credited to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the recorded renditions took on a life of their own. The first recording by a major singer was from gospel and jazz singer Mahalia Jackson in the 50s, and this version is more or less the one we know today. It has a little gospel swing to it with a little piano and a choir setting the stage for Jackson’s insanely powerful voice. Though it’s been recorded countless times since then by artists like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Dolly Parton, Sheryl Crow, Simon and Garfunkel, and a surprising number of country artists like Garth Brooks and Little Big Town, Mahalia Jackson’s is the one to go for if you’re looking for a version with a real spirit and presence.
There is one other version that’s particularly notable. If you’re guessing it’s Hanson’s version from this year, you’d be wrong, but go check that one out anyway.
In 1963, folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary rewrote the song, releasing it as “Tell It On the Mountain.” Protest song was nothing new to Peter, Paul and Mary (songs like “Cruel War,” “Lemon Tree,” and “Blowin’ In the Wind” come to mind), and “Tell It On the Mountain” is no exception. This version eliminates the nativity from the lyrics, replacing it with an excerpt from Moses in Exodus, “Let my people go,” a thinly veiled comment on the civil rights movement in the early 60s. It’s interesting to note the way Peter, Paul and Mary took a spiritual, a song from a genre rich with African-American history in cultural resistance and inner strength, reworked the lyrics, and modernized it, adapting it into a song in solidarity with the mid-20th century struggle for civil rights.
In a time when everyone is still recording “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Santa Baby,” and “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” it’s a shame more people don’t try their hand at “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” a song with history, energy, and room for the belters of the world to flex their talents. Not quite a hidden gem, but pretty underappreciated.
