This spiritual grew out of the nineteenth-century African American oral tradition and was preserved above all at Fisk University in Nashville, where students would rise before dawn on Christmas morning to walk from building to building singing it together. Its refrain is of anonymous, unrecorded folk origin, but its familiar Christmas stanzas were written no later than 1925 by John Wesley Work II, who devoted much of his life alongside his brother to preserving African American spirituals; earlier singers had often substituted unrelated wandering verses, since the original words had little to do with the Nativity even though the song was already sung as a Christmas plantation carol. Work’s son, John Wesley Work III, published his father’s definitive Christmas text in his 1940 collection, American Negro Songs and Spirituals. The tune, built on a pentatonic scale, remains an anonymous folk creation despite occasional claims of later authorship. As the Opening Hymn on the First Sunday after Christmas, it sends the congregation out on the shepherds’ own errand, to go tell it on the mountain that Jesus Christ is born.