352. Every Time I Feel the Spirit

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Every Time I Feel the Spirit" is an African American spiritual dating from before the Civil War, its origins reaching back into the oral tradition of enslaved communities in the antebellum South. It was first documented in Slave Songs of the United States, an 1867 collection compiled shortly after emancipation — one of the earliest systematic attempts to preserve spirituals in print. It appeared again, more formally arranged, in Folk Songs of the American Negro in 1907, compiled by the brothers John W. Work II and Frederick J. Work of Fisk University.

The verses draw their imagery from Exodus 19, where God descends on Mount Sinai in fire and smoke to speak to Moses, and from the Jordan River, the recurring spiritual's-eye boundary between bondage and the promised land found throughout this body of song. The image of "one train on this track" running only to Heaven and back reflects a common device in spirituals of this era — borrowing the imagery of the still-new railroad, a fixture of nineteenth-century American life, to describe the singular, certain path of faith.

The refrain, repeated after every verse, states the song's whole argument in miniature: a felt movement of the Spirit answered immediately by prayer, cause and response bound together without delay. Unlike hymns built on doctrinal argument, "Every Time I Feel the Spirit" offers no explanation of what that movement is or how to recognize it — only the assurance that when it comes, prayer is the response.

The Morehouse College Quartet made the first known recording of the song in 1923, helping carry it from congregational and campus singing into wider popular circulation, where it has remained a fixture of American sacred music for well over a century since its first documentation.