Lyrics
O they tell me of a home far beyond the skies,
O they tell me of a home far away;
O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise,
O they tell me of an unclouded day.
O the land of cloudless day,
O the land of an unclouded day,
O they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise,
O they tell me of an unclouded day.
O they tell me of a home where my friends have gone,
O they tell me of that land far away,
Where the Tree of Life in eternal bloom
Sheds its fragrance through the unclouded day.
O they tell me of a King in His beauty there,
And they tell me that my eyes shall behold
Where He sits on the throne that is whiter than snow,
In the city that is made of gold.
O they tell me that He smiles on His children there,
And His smile drives their sorrows all away;
And they tell me that no tears ever come again,
In that lovely land of unclouded day.
Public domain hymn text and tune (written 1879). Words and music by Josiah K. Alwood.
The Story Behind the Hymn
Josiah Kelley Alwood, a minister ordained in the United Brethren in Christ church, wrote both the words and tune of "The Unclouded Day" out of a single, specific memory. In August 1879, riding home to Morenci, Michigan, around one o'clock in the morning after a debate in Spring Hill, Ohio, Alwood saw an unusual sight in the night sky: a rainbow, glowing faintly against a dense black cloud that covered a portion of the horizon while the rest of the sky stayed clear — almost certainly a moonbow, a rare phenomenon produced by moonlight rather than sunlight.
Alwood later described being struck with "a feeling of solemn joy" as he looked at it, reading the rainbow, in the biblical tradition, as a sign of promise set against the darkness. The image stayed with him overnight, and the next morning he sat down at the small pump organ in his home and worked out the tune that carries the hymn today, its words picturing a heavenly home entirely free of the storm clouds that had framed his roadside vision.
Unlike hymns built on a single central metaphor developed once and left behind, "The Unclouded Day" returns to its central image insistently — nearly every line of the refrain and several lines of each verse repeat some version of the phrase "unclouded day," giving the hymn an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality well suited to congregational and camp-meeting singing.
That same quality later carried the song far outside traditional hymn circles: it became an early staple of the gospel group the Staple Singers, whose 1956 recording reportedly left songwriter Bob Dylan calling it the most mysterious thing he had ever heard, and it has since been recorded by artists ranging from Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson — an improbably long reach for a tune worked out on a farmhouse pump organ the morning after a chance glimpse of moonlight on a storm cloud.
