This Juneteenth, Listen To These Renditions Of 'Lift Every Voice And Sing'
There isn’t a time when musician Desmond Scaife Jr. did not know the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
“My mother's a pianist and choir director so it was almost like a lullaby for me,” said Scaife, who is 26. Hearing it in church as a child “was like heaven's gates were opening.”
Now, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is moving far beyond black churches, civic groups and social organizations that have celebrated it as their own “Black National Anthem” for 100 years. As the nation grapples with the police killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks and so many other African Americans, protesters have taken it up in California, Texas and Washington, D.C., where it was performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial earlier this month.
Desmond Scaife Jr. (left) and Lawrence Watson (right).
“‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ has survived the test of time,” said Lawrence Watson, a vocalist and professor of ensemble, voice and liberal arts at The Berklee College of Music in Boston. Watson performed this song for Nelson Mandela when he toured the U.S. after his release from a South African prison in 1990.
“But many aspects of black culture are not there for the mainstream culture until there is a crisis,” Watson continued. “And then they materialize. But black people have always respected this song.”
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is the most popular composition by the African American brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson. They wrote it against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South at a time when their home state of Florida led the nation in lynchings. It started as a poem James Weldon wrote in 1900, and his younger brother added the music five years later:
Lift every voice and sing
'Til earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea
The new song raced along the avenues and alleyways of black culture so quickly and thoroughly that, by 1920, the NAACP promoted it as “The Negro National Anthem.”
“It was written 40 years after the end of the Civil War,” said Birgitta Johnson, an ethnomusicologist at the University of South Carolina who teaches the song to her students. “So it looks at an African American community that's now emancipated, but clearly not free. The song was passed among the African American community because of the power of the words and the message it holds.”
The song was sung by African American soldiers in World War II and by civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s. A 15-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it in his first public speech, and civil rights icon the Rev. Joseph Lowery referenced it from the steps of the nation’s Capitol at President Barack Obama's first inauguration.
It is in the score of Spike Lee's film "Do The Right Thing," and in the pages of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Included in three dozen church hymnals, it also crosses religious borders — in 1928, Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York’s Free Synagogue wrote to the Johnson brothers, calling the song the “noblest anthem I have ever heard."
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” has three verses, one for the past, the present and the future. It starts full of rejoicing, with “liberty,” “faith” and “hope.” Then comes a lament — a “stony road,” a “chastening rod” and a “bloody path” marched by “weary feet.” The last verse is like a prayer. A "God of our weary years, God of our silent tears" will lead "into the light" so we may stand "true to our native land.”
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast
Melinda Doolittle, a vocalist who made the finals on season six of “American Idol,” recorded an entire album of Johnson brothers’ music. Most of the songs were light entertainment for Broadway and vaudeville. But “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was different.
“I had to be in a place where I could give this the emotional fortitude it needs,” Doolittle said from Franklin, Tennessee, where she is based. “I didn’t need to be singing, you know, ‘Treat Me Like a Baby Doll’ after that. The take you hear on the album is the very first take because I cried through all the rest of them. Just to sing those words with just me and a piano and really think about them and put the feeling behind them — it just hit me in the most beautiful way.”
Melinda Doolittle.
The song has been recorded hundreds, maybe thousands of times, by the likes of Melba Moore, Aretha Franklin, BeBe Winans, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, The Boys Choir of Harlem, The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and even a group called The Band of Heathens. There are dozens of arrangements — a cappella, jazz, acoustic, operatic, orchestral and big band among them.
Part of the song’s genius is it never specifically names slavery or race. Instead, it relies on symbols that resonate with the African American experience. The “bright star” signifies the North Star, the symbol of the path out of slavery, which is invoked by the “chastening rod.”
“If you look at this in 2020 and you see ‘the chastening rod’ you think about the police using batons,” Johnson continued. “At some of the protests, [demonstrators] are moving through the same spaces where people have been killed and their blood is literally either still there or just recently removed. So this song kind of exists in and out of time because these conditions still exist.”
Shana L. Redmond, author of a book on African American anthems, said in 2018 that she started hearing the song at demonstrations about two years after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and again in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
"It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources," Redmond told NPR in 2018 just after megastar Beyonce performed the song at Coachella, elevating it to a global audience. "It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change.”
In 2017, Scaife Jr. led his fellow students at The Berklee College of Music in a syncopated big band arrangement by Watson, his mentor, and Miklos Malek. Scaife is sheltering for the pandemic in Atlanta, where Rayshard Brooks, 27, was shot and killed by police on June 12. Scaife spoke with Religion Unplugged two days later.
“It's a salve or a balm,” said Scaife, who is a year younger than Brooks. “The song becomes healing because it doesn’t matter what generation you are, if you are of an oppressed people, those lyrics apply to you.”
And it is a song that gains power when sung by a spectrum of people. “Anybody can sing it,” he said, placing a hand on his chest, “because you sing it from here. Soul has no race.”
Doolittle recalled a 2015 concert where she sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with the Boston Children's Chorus.
“To watch this extremely diverse choir of kids learn this song and be in tears singing it together helped me feel a part of passing it down,” she said. “And I hope that we continue to do that, teaching our kids that even though things can look hard, there's so much to look forward to.”
You can listen to a radio version of this story on Inspired on Interfaith Radio.
Kimberly Winston is a freelance religion reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today and more. She is the recipient of the Religion News Association’s 2018 award for best religion reporting at large news outlets.