The story behind Go Tell It on the Mountain
Go Tell It on the Mountain is an African American spiritual. The refrain is a command to proclaim, over the hills and everywhere, and the Christmas form of that command says that Jesus Christ is born. It is outdoor music in its imagination: a voice on a height, a message that should travel. It is not a lullaby and not a European cathedral hymn.
The refrain lived in oral tradition before it settled on the page. John Wesley Work Jr., working with the Fisk University community in Nashville, is the person most often credited with publishing it in the early twentieth century and with helping to fix the nativity stanzas that school and church books still print. Later artists wrote new words. Those adaptations, especially civil rights texts, are not the same song as the spiritual, and some of them are under separate copyright.
History and origins
Fisk University in Nashville became a center for the study and concert performance of spirituals after the Fisk Jubilee Singers began touring in 1871 to raise money for the school. John Wesley Work Jr., born in 1871, taught at Fisk, collected songs, and published them so that concerts and congregations would share a readable text. Sources differ on the exact first printing. Some point to New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers around 1901 or 1902, a project also tied to his brother Frederick J. Work. Others emphasize later Fisk collections. What is stable is the circle and the decade: the Work family and Fisk, in the early 1900s, moved this song from memory onto a widely copied page.
Religious Folk Songs of the Negro, associated with the Work family and with Fisk, helped the Christmas stanzas become the version many hymnals treat as standard. Those stanzas follow Luke's scene in short lines: shepherds watching, a light, fear, an angel song, a lowly manger, salvation on Christmas morning. The oral refrain could serve more than one feast. Some singers have carried a line that Jesus lives again, which turns the same tune toward Easter. A proclamation song is reusable. The mountain is a pulpit, and the news changes with the season.
The style is call and response even when a choir sings it in parts. A leader can throw out the first phrase and the company answers. That practice belongs to the ring shout, the prayer meeting, and the concert spiritual alike. Concert arrangements from Fisk onward often smoothed the rhythm for touring audiences and wrote inner parts that the first singers would not have read from a score. Both practices are real. One is the older communal art. The other is the early twentieth century work of Black college musicians who refused to let the songs stay unprinted and unpaid in other people's anthologies.
In the 1950s and 1960s the refrain proved it could carry a different proclamation. Mahalia Jackson had already recorded the Christmas spiritual in 1950. Peter, Paul and Mary, with Milt Okun, released Tell It on the Mountain in 1963, with words that invoke the Exodus line about letting a people go and that audiences heard against the civil rights movement. Scholars note that Fannie Lou Hamer and other movement singers had already joined this tune to Go Down Moses. James Baldwin's 1953 novel uses the title but is not a musical setting. Those later works matter. They are not an excuse to rewrite the spiritual's Christmas text in a carol index as if the folk song and the 1963 single were one copyright and one poem.
Full lyrics
Refrain
Go, tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere.
Go, tell it on the mountain
That Jesus Christ is born.
Verse 1
While shepherds kept their watching
O'er silent flocks by night,
Behold throughout the heavens
There shone a holy light.
Verse 2
The shepherds feared and trembled
When lo, above the earth
Rang out the angel chorus
That hailed our Savior's birth.
Verse 3
Down in a lowly manger
The humble Christ was born,
And God sent us salvation
That blessed Christmas morn.
The text above follows a standard public domain version. Singers will meet small changes from book to book, especially in folk carols.
Lyrics presented for educational and personal use. Sing along responsibly this holiday season!
Meaning and symbolism
The mountain in the refrain is not a picturesque backdrop. In scripture a mountain is where news is shouted and where a city cannot be hidden. The spiritual takes that biblical habit of elevated speech and aims it at the nativity. Go tell it means the birth is not a private wonder for the singers. It is a report. Over the hills and everywhere refuses a fenced congregation. The Christmas stanzas then supply the report's content: light over a night field, frightened shepherds, a chorus, a child in a manger who is named salvation.
Because the refrain is older and more flexible than any one set of verses, the song's symbolism is the act of telling. Bethlehem is in the stanzas. The mountain is in the command. Communities under pressure have heard in that command a right to announce what the powerful would rather keep quiet. That hearing produced freedom verses. It does not erase the Christmas hearing. A carol page can honor both if it refuses to mix the words. The spiritual says the child is born. The movement song says a people should go free. The tune is strong enough to have held each sentence in its own time.
Fun facts and statistics
- The refrain comes from African American oral tradition and is older than the printed Christmas stanzas.
- John Wesley Work Jr. and the Fisk University circle published the song in the early 1900s.
- Accounts differ on whether the earliest printing is closer to 1901 or to a slightly later Fisk collection.
- The Christmas verses follow the shepherd story and name the birth, not a lullaby scene.
- Some singers have used the refrain with an Easter line that Jesus lives again.
- Mahalia Jackson recorded the spiritual in 1950.
- Peter, Paul and Mary's 1963 Tell It on the Mountain is a separate adaptation associated with civil rights language.
- James Baldwin's 1953 novel takes the title and is not a version of the carol.
Top 5 most popular renditions
Fisk Jubilee Singers
early 1900s
The Fisk Jubilee Singers had been carrying spirituals to concert halls since 1871. In the early 1900s the Work family's printed collections gave Go Tell It on the Mountain a stable place in that repertory, with Christmas stanzas a choir could rehearse. Concert spiritual singing in that era was arranged, often in parts, and aimed at mixed audiences who might never have sat in the churches where the refrain began. The Fisk stage is one reason a proclamation song from oral tradition became a carol book standard without losing its name.
Fisk Jubilee Singers
Mahalia Jackson
1950
Mahalia Jackson recorded Go Tell It on the Mountain on October 17, 1950, and it was issued as a single that November. She brought gospel weight, a slow burn, and a lead singer's authority to a tune many people knew only as a folk chorus. Jackson's Christmas performances mattered because she did not turn the spiritual into a cute children's piece. The birth announcement still sounds like testimony. Later reissues kept that 1950 reading in earshot for listeners who came to carols through gospel records rather than through hymnals.
Mahalia Jackson
Peter, Paul and Mary
1963
Peter, Paul and Mary and their musical director Milt Okun recorded Tell It on the Mountain in 1963, rewriting the spiritual so that the Exodus plea to let a people go stands in the refrain. Radio heard it as a folk single with a civil rights edge, and it reached the pop charts the following year. The record is important and it is not the Fisk Christmas text. Fannie Lou Hamer and other movement singers had already coupled this tune with liberation words. Quote and license the 1963 lyric as its own work.
Peter, Paul and Mary
Simon and Garfunkel
1964
Simon and Garfunkel included Go Tell It on the Mountain on their debut album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., released in 1964. The track sits among folk revival readings of public domain songs, sung in close harmony with acoustic guitars. It carried the spiritual to collegiate listeners who were also buying protest songs. Their version belongs to that Greenwich Village moment rather than to a Black church service or to the later pop single's rewritten chorus. Hearing it beside Mahalia Jackson shows how wide the tune had become in a single decade.
Simon and Garfunkel
Congregational shout tradition
present
The oldest rendition is still the least documented: a leader and a company, a refrain anyone can grab, a Christmas shout rather than a performance for strangers. That practice continues in African American congregations, where the song can open or crown a Christmas praise set. No single year belongs to it. What belongs to it is the mountain as a place of announcement. Choir arrangements and folk records are descendants. The living refrain, clapped and repeated, is the root the early Fisk transcribers were trying to catch on paper.
Congregational shout tradition
Sheet music
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Notes for singers
If you place Go Tell It on the Mountain in a December service, a school program, or a living room sing, teach Traditional before you add harmony. A confident melody lets guests enter on the refrain. Say the names when you introduce it. The words are credited to Traditional, and the music to Traditional. The year to remember is early 1900s, and the place to name is United States.
This sits in the library as a spiritual. Let that tradition set the tempo. A lullaby loses its point if it is hurried. A dance carol loses its point if every syllable is precious. Leave a breath at the end of the verse so the next line feels chosen rather than chased.
The refrain comes from African American oral tradition and is older than the printed Christmas stanzas. Hold that fact in the introduction you speak, not only in a program note. John Wesley Work Jr. and the Fisk University circle published the song in the early 1900s. Those two details give a listener a reason to hear the song as a made thing, not as wallpaper.
When the group is small, one voice can carry the verse and everyone can take the refrain. When the group is a choir, decide in advance whether you are telling a story or painting a picture. Story songs want clear words. Picture songs can bloom. Go Tell It on the Mountain will tell you which it is after a single unaccompanied read through.
Questions readers ask
No single author wrote the refrain. It is an African American spiritual from oral tradition. John Wesley Work Jr. and the Fisk University circle published it in the early 1900s and helped fix the Christmas verses about the shepherds and the manger. Later writers, including the team behind Peter, Paul and Mary's 1963 record, added different words that should be credited separately.
No. The refrain is a command to tell news on the mountain and over the hills. The Christmas stanzas report light, fear, angels, and a child in a manger, but the mood is proclamation. Tempo in church is often bright. Treating it as a hushed cradle song fights the grammar of the first line.
They use the tune and the idea of telling, and some of them were sung in the freedom movement, including pairings with Go Down Moses associated with Fannie Lou Hamer. Peter, Paul and Mary's Tell It on the Mountain is an adaptation with its own copyright. The spiritual's Christmas text remains the public domain carol. Do not paste the two poems together.
The refrain was a reusable announcement. Christmas singers name the birth. Other singers have pointed the same chorus toward Easter and the resurrection. That variety is a sign of oral use, not a mistake in the Christmas stanzas. Hymnals that follow the Fisk Christmas text are choosing one historic assignment of the tune.
Why this song endures
The refrain is one sentence a crowd can learn before the first verse ends. That is a practical reason it has outlived many longer carols. It also names a task instead of a mood. Lullabies soothe. This song sends. Communities that treat Christmas as news rather than as atmosphere keep returning to it. The melody sits in a range that a congregation can shout without a rehearsal, which is how spirituals were built to survive.
It endures in another way because the command stays open. Tell it on the mountain can carry a birth, a resurrection, or a demand for freedom, and history has already tested each use. The Christmas form remains the one this index prints, with the shepherds and the manger as Work and the Fisk books helped to stabilize them. The openness is not vagueness. It is the mark of a song that was always more interested in the hearer over the next hill than in a single night's sentiment.