Let us break bread together on our knees;
Let us break bread together on our knees;
When I fall on my knees,
With my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me.
Let us drink wine together on our knees;
Let us drink wine together on our knees;
When I fall on my knees,
With my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me.
Let us praise God together on our knees;
Let us praise God together on our knees;
When I fall on my knees,
With my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me.
Public domain hymn text (Traditional, 19th century). Words by Anonymous.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This hymn is a traditional African American spiritual whose original individual author and composer remain entirely unknown today, having been passed down for an extended period purely through oral tradition among enslaved and later free Black communities across the American South, well before it was ever eventually transcribed in written musical notation and formally published within printed hymnals sometime during the early twentieth century.
Its lyrics draw directly on the specific Christian practice of Communion, or the Lord's Supper, deliberately using the shared, physically communal posture of kneeling together side by side in group prayer as a central, unifying image representing genuine Christian fellowship and full spiritual equality before God — a specific message of shared spiritual standing and equal worth that carried particular, urgent weight and meaning specifically within communities where genuine equality was systematically and violently denied in nearly every other visible area of daily life under slavery and, later, under segregation.
Because this hymn developed anonymously over an extended period through purely oral tradition, passed by memory from one generation of singers to the next, rather than being composed and formally published from the outset by a single identifiable named writer, in the manner of the great majority of other hymns found throughout the rest of this collection, the hymn's own exact original date and specific place of composition cannot be pinned down today with any real historical precision.
Scholars specializing in African American religious music generally trace this hymn's likely roots back to the broader plantation-era spiritual tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an entire body of communally created and sustained religious song produced and preserved under conditions of genuinely profound human hardship and injustice that nonetheless went on to produce some of the single most enduring, most widely translated, and most universally sung hymns found anywhere within the entire English language, this particular hymn included, its origins in anonymous communal suffering now largely unknown to the many congregations around the world who continue to sing it today.
