Hymn of the Month: June, 2025
Every Time I Feel the Spirit
TEXT: African American Spiritual
TUNE: African American Spiritual, arr. Joseph T. Jones
Every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Yes, every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Upon the mountain, when my Lord spoke,
out of God's mouth came fire and smoke.
Looked all around me, it looked so fine,
till I asked my Lord if all was mine.
Every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Yes, every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Jordan River, chilly and cold,
it chills the body but not the soul.
There is but one train upon this track.
It runs to heaven and then right back.
Every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Yes, every time I feel the Spirit
moving in my heart I will pray.
Enjoy this month’s hymn/spiritual for the season of Pentecost.
The article comes from Dr. Michael Hawn’s Discipleship web page. His articles are always filled with so much great information.
“Every Time I Feel the Spirit” explores the powerful combination of Spirit and prayer as indicated in the key words of the refrain. African American scholar W.E.B. DuBois (1868–1963) ascribed three gifts from the African American community that “mingle” with the others who occupy the land now called the United States of America. The first is “the gift of story and song.” The second is “the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire . . . .” The third gift is “the gift of the Spirit” (DuBois, 1903, pp. 189–190). The following witness indicates that the Spirit imbued enslaved Africans with both joy and endurance:
In slavery times, my master whipped me terribly, especially when he knew I was praying. He was determined to whip the Spirit out of me, but he never could, for the more he whipped me, the more the Spirit made me happy to be whipped. (name unknown, from Chenu, 2003, p. 195; cited in Guenther, 2016, p. 91)
“This widely known spiritual describes ‘the power and energy released in black devotion to the God of emotion.’ Black people have never had any concept of a God who could not be felt. It is this feeling of the spirit of God that renders the Black religious experience incomparable to any other” (McCain, 1990, pp. 105–106; italics in original).
The spirituals not only speak of prayer but are often prayers. “It’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer” identifies each person’s need for prayer. “Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart” is a prayer of contrition and holiness. African American activist and children’s advocate Marian Wright Edleman (b. 1939) affirms the role of prayer in this way: “We Black children were wrapped up and rocked in the cradle of faith, song, prayer, ritual, and worship, which immunized our spirits against some of the meanness and unfairness inflicted on our young psyches by racial discrimination and poverty in our segregated South and acquiescent nation” (Edleman, 1996, p. xxi). Sung prayer is a way of surviving.
The roots of this spiritual may be found in the antebellum South. One often-cited report indicates that Abraham Lincoln heard a group of escaped slaves led by “Aunt Mary” Dines singing this spiritual, among others, during one of his visits to the “contraband” camp at Seventh Street in Washington, D.C. Contraband camps were areas where escaped enslaved people lived. The description notes that Lincoln sang with the group as they were singing for him. Not all accounts include this spiritual with those that were said to have been sung on this occasion, but many do (See ‘Music of the Civil War,” n.d., n.p.). The event was documented with a photograph by celebrated antebellum and Civil War photojournalist Matthew Brady (1822–1896), who captured the camp members lined up to receive Lincoln (Washington, 1942, pp. 85–88; cited in Daw, 2016, p. 67).
Carl Daw Jr. suggests that the images and allusions in the stanzas were “floating” themes that might appear in other spirituals (Daw, 2016, p. 67). The stanzas were, for the most part, standardized as early as 1909 in Thomas Fenner’s groundbreaking Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, published while he taught at the Hampton Institute (now University) in Virginia. An allusion to Moses on Mt. Sinai undergirds stanza 1, noting that all gleamed (‘shine’) from that height. In stanza 2, the singer seems to join Moses on the heights of Pisgah to view the Promised Land. Spirituals and gospel hymns are replete with references to the Jordan River (stanza 3). For the enslaved African, the Jordan could be a place of physical freedom in the north or the liminal spiritual space between this life and heaven. Numerous biblical references to the Jordan River, including one from Numbers, link the Jordan to the Promised Land. In addition, Matthew’s Gospel records that Jesus received the Spirit in his baptism in the Jordan River.
Upon the mountain my Lord spoke,
Out of His mouth came fire and smoke. (Exodus 19:18)
All around me looks so shine,
Ask my Lord if all was mine. (Deuteronomy 34:1–4)
Jordan river is chilly and cold,
Chills the body but not the soul. (Numbers 35:9–11; Matthew 3:13–17)
Theologian James Cone (1938–2018) captures the spiritual’s importance for the African American community:
To interpret the theological significance of [this] spiritual for the black community, “academic” tools are not enough. The interpreter must feel the Spirit; that is, he must feel his way into the power of black music, responding both to its rhythm and the faith in experience it affirms. This song invites the believer to move close to the very sources of black being and to experience the black community’s power to endure, the will to survive. The mountains may be high and the valleys low, but “my Lord spoke” and “out of his mouth came fire and smoke.” All the believer has to do is to respond to the divine apocalyptic discourse of God’s revelation and cry, “Have mercy, please.” (Cone, 1972, p. 5; italics in original)
“Every Time I Feel the Spirit” does not appear to have been a part of the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers’ publications or concert repertoire at the end of the nineteenth century. It may have made its way into the repertoire through the Hampton Institute publications, quartet concerts, and recordings in the early twentieth century. Like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Hampton sent out choirs and quartets to sing spirituals and raise funds to support the struggling institution.
Of all the Spirituals, this is one of the most touching in its prayerful suggestion and quiet reverence and in the poetic imagery of its verse, couched in a few crude words, elemental in their simplicity, yet somehow conveying the grandeur of the vision of God on the mountaintop and the dazed soul beholding heaven (Burlin, 1918, p. 28).
