There are so many areas of interest implicit in this brief arrangement of several Black spirituals that I hardly know where to begin. I’ll start with encouraging you to read my post “How Did We Get African-American Spirituals?” Got that? Okay, let’s move on to this specific arrangement that includes texts from “Oh, What a Beautiful City” and “In Bright Mansions Above” as well as fragments from other sources. The words from these are melded seamlessly and beautifully, with the slower, quieter phrases from “Mansions” providing the bridge, or contrasting middle section, for the piece. And of course, since the actual spirituals dating from before the Civil War are all anonymous, anyone can do anything with them. Even if we did know authors’ names the copyright would long ago have expired.
So you may have thought when you read the title of this post that the answers were pretty obvious, and indeed they are to some extent. The “beautiful city” is, of course, heaven, and the “12 gates” are the “pearly gates” mentioned in the book of Revelation, the last book in the Christian New Testament. In fact, let’s just stop here for a moment and read the actual description: