397. Great Getting-Up Morning

The Story Behind the Hymn

'Great Getting-Up Morning' is a traditional African American spiritual with no documented single author, developed within Southern Black church communities and passed down orally before being collected and printed by folklorists and hymnal compilers in the decades following the Civil War.

Its central figure is the archangel Gabriel, drawn from apocalyptic biblical imagery in passages like 1 Thessalonians 4 and Matthew 24, where a trumpet call announces the resurrection of the dead and the final gathering of the faithful.

The song imagines that moment almost as a scene being narrated in real time, with the preacher told to 'fold your Bible' because preaching itself is finished, since 'the last soul's converted,' a vivid way of picturing history's very last day of gospel invitation.

Its repeated refrain, 'fare thee well, fare thee well,' functions as a farewell to the ordinary world and the ordinary business of daily life, sung not with fear but with the same plain, steady repetition found in many spirituals describing the end of earthly time.

The song's dramatic, almost theatrical structure, addressing Gabriel directly and asking how loud the final trumpet must be blown, made it a favorite for solo or call-and-response performance, giving a lead singer room for expressive interpretation within a fixed, familiar refrain.

Unlike spirituals focused on personal comfort or quiet endurance, this one treats the Day of Judgment as collective and cosmic, a single decisive morning affecting all of creation at once rather than a private hope held by one believer.

That scale, picturing the end of history as one enormous, world-ending event rather than a private passage, has kept the song a dramatic centerpiece in gospel choir and concert spiritual repertoires well into the present day.