Music Notes for February 21

This week’s anthem is an arrangement of the well-known spiritual, “I want Jesus to walk with me.”  Like many African-American spirituals, “I want Jesus to walk with me” has no known author and is essentially a folk song, part of a shared response to the experience of hardship and oppression.  Many variants in the text and tune exist and additional verses might be improvised.  One of the first records of the spiritual is in Dorothy Bolton and Harry Burleigh’s Old Songs Hymnal (1929), where its title is “I want Jesus to talk with me.”  The spiritual was frequently performed by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a group of singers formed in 1871 as a fundraising effort for Fisk University, a historically black college in Tennessee.  According to the historian Calvin Earl, on one of their early tours singing this spiritual saved the group from a hostile mob.