357. My Lord, What a Morning

The Story Behind the Hymn

"My Lord, What a Morning" is a Black spiritual whose exact origins are difficult to pin down, likely dating to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. Some evidence points to its having been written or shaped by free Black people in a Northern city rather than solely within the plantation South — an early related version appeared in Philadelphia in 1801, published by Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The hymn belongs to a distinct strand of spirituals concerned less with present suffering than with the promised end of all things: the Second Coming of Christ, imagined in the vivid apocalyptic terms scattered throughout the New Testament. Its central image, stars falling from the sky, echoes both Matthew 24, where Christ describes the sun darkening and stars falling before His return, and Revelation 6, where the same image marks the opening of the sixth seal. The trumpet sound that wakes "the nations underground" draws on Paul's description of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4, where a trumpet call raises the dead at the end of the age.

Structurally, the hymn separates its response to that final morning into three distinct groups — the sinner, who moans; the Christian, who shouts — each hearing the same trumpet but responding according to what they had made of their lives before it sounded. The refrain's repeated wonder, "my Lord, what a morning," carries both terror and hope at once, exactly as the biblical text it draws from does.

The composer Harry T. Burleigh, whose arrangements did much to bring spirituals into concert and choral settings in the early twentieth century, produced one of the hymn's most widely performed versions, helping carry this vision of the last morning far beyond the communities that first sang it.