Uploaded February 2024 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
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![MY LORD, WHAT A MORNING! (Spiritual); [The Seekers] A Capella Hymn](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TrFk3-R6QMg/mqdefault.jpg "MY LORD, WHAT A MORNING! (Spiritual); [The Seekers] A Capella Hymn
Here is an African American Spiritual that was most likely originally sung by slaves in the north of the USA. This arrangement is based on a version popularized by The Seekers, an Australian Folk/Gospel band. Lead singer Judith Durham recently passed away.
This spiritual has a mournful but hopeful element to it, using the imagery of Judgment day coming, presumably the unsaved white slave-owners weeping for the rocks and mountains, and a shout of victory going up as the faithful are delivered from their earthly bonds to spend freedom in Heaven for eternity.
Scholars have subjected the origins of African American spirituals to considerable speculation. Traditional hymnology places stress on a particular author or composer as the point of origin. Eileen Southern (1920–2002), a pioneering musicologist in African American music, offers further origin classifications. She examines the background of spirituals in three areas: “the time of origin, the place of origin, and the manner of origin” (Southern, 1972, p. 8). For traditional hymnological scholarship, this is a helpful clarification.
Southern credits A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (Philadelphia, 1801) by Richard Allen (1760–1831) for the inspiration behind this spiritual. Allen was the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent African American denomination. He observed that African Americans in Philadelphia were creating a category of congregational songs beyond those composed by the traditional British hymnodists of the day, especially eighteenth-century hymnwriters John Newton, Isaac Watts, and Charles Wesley. This collection may be the first one to distinguish between hymns and spiritual songs in the African American context (Southern, 1972, p. 12). These “spiritual songs”—later spirituals—often employed call-response forms of performance and incorporated refrains. They found a voice in independent black churches and camp meetings, though never appearing in printed collections.
While many spirituals may have been conceived on plantations in the southern United States, Southern contends that free African Americans also composed them “in the independent black congregations of the North, where black congregations, freed from the supervision of white clergymen, could conduct their religious services as they wished” (Southern, 1972, p. 11). “My Lord, What a Morning” appears to have been one of those composed in the North.
from https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/articles/history-of-hymns-my-lord-what-a-morning
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