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93. Great Camp Meeting (aka There’s A Great Camp Meeting In The Promised Land)
Written by Unknown
Performed by The Fisk Jubilee Singers c.1909
From the CD Fisk Jubilee Singers – Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Volume One, 1909 – 1911 (Document Records, UK 1997)

 

 

O, Walk together children
Don’t you get weary
Walk together children
Don’t you get weary
Walk together children
Don’t you get weary
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land
Talk together children
Don’t you get weary
Talk together children
Don’t you get weary
Talk together children

Don’t you get weary
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land

Going to shout and never tire
Shout and never tire
Shout and never tire
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land

O Get you ready children

Don’t you get weary
Get you ready children
Don’t you get weary
Get you ready children
Don’t you get weary
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land
For Jesus is a-coming

Don’t you get weary
Jesus is a-coming
Don’t you get weary
Jesus is a-coming
Don’t you get weary
There’s a great camp meeting in the Promised Land

O, I feel the spirit….

Now I’m getting happy

 

The refrain ‘don’t get weary’ appeared in Allen, Ware & Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States as evidence of the slave’s implicit humanity, and returned, five years later, in the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ Jubilee Songs As Sung by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University (1872), [1] in the service, once again, of black emancipation, emancipation being the meaning of the term ‘Jubilee’ – the group had taken the term from the Old Testament, from chapter twenty-five of Leviticus, which told of the Jewish Year of Jubilee which took place every fifty years and was celebrated with debt relief and the emancipation of slaves. [2]

The Jubilee Singers’ songbook was sold at performances by the group for twenty-five cents per copy. [3] Profits from the books and the performances were used to fund the Fisk Free Coloured School, which was officially opened in January 1866 and incorporated as Fisk University in August 1867. [4]

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were put together by George Leonard White, First Sergeant in the U.S Civil War, veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg, founder of a black Sunday school in Ohio, and treasurer of the Fisk University. In 1866 White, still in his twenties, volunteered himself for the post of the University’s choirmaster and trained the University’s students to sing European popular songs of the day.

The school, a series of converted army barracks, suffered several attacks from whites, who took great offence at the idea of a black university. By 1871 the school was deep in debt. The success of a fundraising tour across Tennessee prompted White to take the group on a tour of America’s northern states. After discovering that what really moved their white middle class audiences were not European pop songs but the sacred songs their parents and grandparents had sung as slaves, [5] the group made these songs the main content of their repertoire. Such was the success of these songs with white Americans, the Fisk Jubilee Singers embarked on a fundraising tour of England in 1873, whose aim was ‘to sing the money out of the hearts and pockets of the people.’ [6] In London they performed for Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone.

A second tour of Britain in 1875 saw the group performing to audiences in their thousands. [7] By 1878 the group’s original members disbanded and the University had stopped using the group as a source of revenue. [8] But by then they had raised enough money to transform Fisk University’s ailing fortunes and their repertoire of songs had helped initiate a transformation of white perceptions of black sonic expression: ‘These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil,’ was how composer Antonin Dvorak put it. ‘They are American. They are the folksongs of America, and your composers must turn to them. In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.’ [9]

A second incarnation of the group toured the world, and several incarnations of the Fisk Jubilee Singers followed and continue to this day. Phonographic recordings made by the group in the early twentieth century proved as popular as their performances were in the nineteenth century.

There’s a Great Camp Meeting In The Promised Land became one of a number of sacred songs featured in American Negro Songs, written by musicologist and musician John W. Work in 1940 and known also as American Negro Songs and Spirituals, and it is from this volume that we have transcribed the song. John Work was born in 1901. His grandfather, John Wesley Work, was a church choir director in Nashville. Some of his choristers were members of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, [10] and Work was educated at Fisk himself. In 1927, after graduating from the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now the Julliard School of Music) he returned to Fisk and taught music education and theory. In 1946 Work became the musical director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

The song’s imprecation against physical and spiritual weariness resonated well into the twentieth century. The Thursday October 20 1960 edition of the Stevens Point (Wisconsin) Daily Journal reported from Atlanta, Georgia, that ‘Following a pledged ‘Jail instead of Bail’ policy, integration leader Martin Luther King Jr, and 35 other demonstrators against segregated eating facilities were behind bars today awaiting trial on charges of violating the state anti-trespass laws. They were among 51 Negroes and one white person arrested Wednesday following a well organised invasion of downtown Atlanta by Negroes picketing and staging sit-in demonstrations at stores with segregated lunch counters. King, who said he was an invited participant and not a leader of the demonstrations, vowed to remain in Jail a year if necessary rather than make bond. He also said the demonstrations will continue ‘until something is done.’’ [11]

And here is the great man himself in December of that year, reflecting on the events of that year and those before it, during which his home had been bombed, he had been stabbed, and as we have seen, arrested: ‘Over the last few years, circumstances have made it necessary for me to stand so often amid the surging of life’s restless sea. Moments of frustration, the chilly winds of adversity all around, but there was always something deep down within that could keep me going, a strange feeling that you are not alone in this struggle, that the struggle for the good life is a struggle in which the individual has cosmic companionship. For so many times I have been able with my people to walk and never get weary because I am convinced that there is a great camp meeting in the promised land of God’s universe. Maybe St. Augustine was right: we were made for God; we will be restless until we find rest in him.’ [12]

       

Sources

[1-4] Smith, Llewellyn and Andrew Ward. The Jubilee Singers: Sacrifice and Glory (The American Experience), Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2000. Reviewed by Dave Thomson. www.twainweb.net/reviews/jubilee.html
[5 - 7] The American Experience: George Leonard White http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/singers/peopleevents/pande05.html
[8] http://www.womeninjazzswansea.org.uk/history/fisk.asp
[9] ‘‘Might Take One Disc of This Trash as a Novelty’: Early Recordings by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the Popularization of ‘Negro Folk Music’’,
by Tim Brooks, American Music, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000) University of Illinois Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/3052431
[10] ‘John Wesley Work III (1901-1967)’http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftvhtml/workbio.html
[11] Martin Luther King, Jr. Newspaper Archive http://www.martinlutherkingjrarchive.com/Viewer.aspx?img=7358639
[12] The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959-December 1960, by Martin Luther King, Jr., Clayborne Carson, Peter Holloran, Ralph Luker, Penny A. Russell. Published by University of California Press, 2005

 

 

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