Uploaded January 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Day 299 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Serie
First Published: Slave Songs of the United States (1867), indexed as Good-bye, song #70. The only comment: "This is sung at the breaking up of a meeting, with a general shaking of hands, and the name of him or her pronounced, whose hand is shaken; of course there is seeming confusion."
In the book, Somebody’s Calling My Name, Wyatt Walker presents the views of researchers Harold Courlander and Hildred Roach on the use of double entendre in slave songs. According to Walker, both researchers agree that the double meaning did not always signal a desire to escape from slavery, although that was often the case.
Roach asserts that these songs showed an obsession with “freedom land” but the meaning of Jesus is a bit ambiguous. Jesus, in the slave song, could mean “The Christ” of Christianity; Ntoa, the supernatural spirits of the ancestors; or Harriet Tubman of the Underground Railroad.
Depending upon the circumstances and the singer, Canaan could mean Heaven, a better life in the north or freedom.
In the play, A Woman Called Truth, by Sandra Fenichel Asher, this song is sung to Isabelle Betts (who later renamed herself Sojourner Truth) after she was sold and separated from her family.
Day 299 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Serie
First Published: Slave Songs of the United States (1867), indexed as Good-bye, song #70. The only comment: "This is sung at the breaking up of a meeting, with a general shaking of hands, and the name of him or her pronounced, whose hand is shaken; of course there is seeming confusion."
In the book, Somebody’s Calling My Name, Wyatt Walker presents the views of researchers Harold Courlander and Hildred Roach on the use of double entendre in slave songs. According to Walker, both researchers agree that the double meaning did not always signal a desire to escape from slavery, although that was often the case.
Roach asserts that these songs showed an obsession with “freedom land” but the meaning of Jesus is a bit ambiguous. Jesus, in the slave song, could mean “The Christ” of Christianity; Ntoa, the supernatural spirits of the ancestors; or Harriet Tubman of the Underground Railroad.
Depending upon the circumstances and the singer, Canaan could mean Heaven, a better life in the north or freedom.
In the play, A Woman Called Truth, by Sandra Fenichel Asher, this song is sung to Isabelle Betts (who later renamed herself Sojourner Truth) after she was sold and separated from her family.
