While shepherds kept their watching
O’er silent flocks by night,
Behold, throughout the heavens
There shone a holy light.
Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere;
Go, tell it on the mountain,
That Jesus Christ is born.
The shepherds feared and trembled
When lo! above the earth
Rang out the angel chorus
That hailed our Savior’s birth.
Public domain hymn text (Traditional; published 1907). Words by Anonymous, arr. John Wesley Work II.
The Story Behind the Hymn
This spiritual's original author and composer are unknown, having developed anonymously through oral tradition among African American communities in the American South sometime during the nineteenth century, most likely in the years following emancipation, before eventually being transcribed and published in written form.
John Wesley Work II, a professor at Fisk University — the same historically Black university whose touring Fisk Jubilee Singers, discussed elsewhere in this collection in connection with 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' (hymn 170), first brought African American spirituals to wide public and international attention in the 1870s — collected, arranged, and published this particular spiritual in 1907, helping preserve it in written form during a period when Work and his colleagues at Fisk were actively working to formally document and publish a body of spirituals that had, until that point, existed almost entirely through oral transmission.
The spiritual's central command, to actively 'go, tell it on the mountain,' reflects a recurring emphasis found across a considerable number of African American spirituals on the active, urgent sharing of good news, treating the gospel message specifically as something to be carried outward and proclaimed widely rather than held privately, a theme that resonated with particular force within communities for whom public testimony and shared communal worship carried deep, hard-won significance.
The spiritual's specifically joyful, celebratory Christmas subject matter sets it apart from some of the more sorrowful or longing spirituals also represented in this collection, and it has become, since its early twentieth-century publication, one of the most widely recognized and frequently performed African American spirituals specifically associated with the Christmas season, sung by choirs and congregations across virtually every English-speaking Christian denominational tradition.
