Warning: Thickets of parsing through a song’s lyrics word by word ahead. Enter at your own risk!
Let me start by quoting myself from the post “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”—
The simplified explanation of how Black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs.
There’s the added wrinkle that the spirituals are true folk songs; that is, they were not originally written down but were passed down orally. Thus there are always multiple versions of any spiritual. Here’s a good explanation of how the process of transcribing the spirituals, but indeed any folk music, worked, as described in an article about the efforts of John W. Work III, a scholar and teacher at Fisk University in the early 1900’s:
Like his father, John W. Work III collected songs by traveling and attending church services in remote areas. He described the paradox of recording a folk song in an untitled manuscript, saying that no matter the skill of the transcriber, the singer was unlikely to perform the song in the same way each time, so it’s only possible to collect variants of a real song. This held true for both the notes and the dialect of the songs Work collected, which differed by region. (“From a Mountain to a Little Light: How Three Men Named John Work Traced a Century of African American Music”)
John W. Work is a relevant source for this spiritual, as he’s listed as the arranger for one popular version.
On to the words of this specific spiritual and their meaning. Below is the most complete listing of the various verses I’ve been able to cobble together; most versions use just the refrain and verse 1, with much repetition, and I found only one version that includes the “Oh. Mary don’ you weep” lines. Mary’s name on its own could refer to Mary the mother of Jesus, admonishing her not to weep at the death of her son. The inclusion of Martha in the next line, though, shifts the meaning to the raising of Lazarus from the dead; Mary and Martha were his sisters. Either way, the women were similar in that they mourned the death of a loved one and then saw that loved one resurrected. So they should rejoice and ring bells. The scene then moves to heaven, the New Jerusalem, with the archangels themselves participating in the rejoicing, with a-rockin’ and a-ringin’.
Which raises the question: what’s going on with this “a-rockin’?” It’s very tempting to think of some kind of heavenly rock concert going on, but of course (I had to remind myself) this song was written way before the advent of rock music. So what are the angels doing? You wouldn’t believe how many rabbit trails I’ve pursued looking for the answer to this question, and I can’t say that I’ve found anything definitive, but here’s a very suggestive quotation from a scholarly paper I ran across about the earliest minstrel shows, ones that didn’t use the later stereotypes of lazy or ignorant enslaved Blacks but instead portrayed them as wily tricksters, well able to get the better of their White masters. The most popular of these entertainers in the 1830’s, a White man who performed in blackface named Thomas D. Rice, used the name “Jim Crow” for his onstage character. Here’s what my source has to say about his dancing:
Crow’s dancing reflected this energy. There are few contemporary descriptions of the dance that is considered to have been the primary force behind Rice’s meteoric rise to fame. In 1881, The New York Times described what it claimed were the origins of the dance: Rice’s observations of a disabled stable slave with crooked knees, a “laughable limp,” and drawn up shoulders. The slave danced and sang, and, the story said, “at the end of every verse would give a little jump, and when he came down, he set his “heel a-rockin!” (“Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776–1860“)
I’m going to lean heavily on this rather thin reed and picture those angels as dancing. The next verse of the songs says that the church (that is, all believers) is going to rise up to Jerusalem (and therefore “get higher”) to join in the heavenly celebration. Since many if not most spirituals carry multiple meanings, this idea of the church rising up can also refer to the ultimate deliverance of those enslaved. And what about those lambs? Who are they? That verse actually belongs to another spiritual but turned up in one or two versions of “Rockin’,” so I kept it in. It’s pretty clear that this is a case of transposing words from one song to another, a process that happens frequently with oral transmission. In addition, the tune to the other spiritual is pretty similar to that of “Rockin’.” The “lambs” are almost certainly a reference to Isaiah 40:11—“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd, and gently lead those that are with young.” I’ll include a video of that song below.
One further note: I’ve used the wording “rockin’ in Jerusalem” instead of just “rockin’ Jerusalem.” I kept thinking early on in my research that the preposition should be included; the song wasn’t saying that the city itself was rockin’ but that there were some rockin’ going in inside it. I kept looking until I found some versions that supported my priors. Nothing like motivated reasoning, I always say. But it’s easy to see how that “in” got dropped out. I’m just performing the public service of putting it back!
Refrain:
Oh, Mary don’ you weep; don’ you mourn,
Oh, Mary don’ you weep; don’ you mourn.
O Mary, O Martha, O Mary ring-a dem bells.
I hear arch angels a-rockin’ in Jerusalem,
I hear arch angels a-ringin’ dem bells.
Church gettin’ higher,
Rockin’ in Jerusalem!
Church gettin’ higher,
Ringin’ dem bells.
Refrain
Listen to the lambs,
Rockin’ in Jerusalem!
Listen to the lambs,
Ringin’ dem bells.
Refrain
New Jerusalem,
Rockin’ in Jerusalem!
New Jerusalem,
Ringin’ in dem bells.
Refrain
I hear rockin’ in the land
And ringin’ them bells.
And now for a plethora of videos. This first one is the aforementioned arrangement by John W. Work III. Note that it’s pretty subdued:
And an arrangement by Stacey V. Gibbs, a contemporary composer and arranger:
A fabulous performance from the music Choir Boy, performed at the 2019 Tony Awards:
And, finally, for comparison purposes, the spiritual “Listen to the Lambs,” obviously being sung at a Christmas concert, which includes the passage from Isaiah–
© Debi Simons
