Go Tell it on Mountain : Complete Sing-along & Ukulele Tutorial

Posted by on December 6th 2020 @ 6:56 pm

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This song has grown a lot on me over the years. I really didn’t know what to make of it when I was very young as it was so different from the kinds of songs I was used to hearing around Christmas. Thankfully, my choir director in high school exposed us to all kinds of spirituals and they have now become one of my favorite genres to listen to and to sing. This song dates back to at least 1865 and has been recorded by many artists. That we have it to enjoy today is thanks to John Wesley Work, Jr. as recounted on Gaither:

John Wesley Work, Jr., may not have originated the Negro spiritual “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” but he can take credit for the fact that we still sing it every Christmas.  As the son of a church choir director, Work grew up in Nashville loving music.  Even though he earned his Master’s in Latin and went on to teach ancient Latin and Greek, his first love continued to be music, and he went on to become the first African-American collector of Negro spirituals.  This proved to be a daunting task for Work because they were passed down orally, from plantation to plantation; very few were ever written down.  But Work proved up to the challenge, publishing his first book, New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, in Songs of the American Negro, six years later.  It was in this second volume that “Go, Tell It on the Mountain” first appeared.  The original singers of the song fulfilled the same important task the angels gave the shepherds that first Christmas night outside of Bethlehem, proclaiming, “that Jesus Christ is born!”  And thanks to John Wesley Work, so can we.

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