Lyrics
The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in nineteenth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.
I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow,
I'm tossed in this wide world alone;
No hope have I for tomorrow,
I've started to make heaven my home.
Sometimes I am tossed and driven, Lord,
Sometimes I don't know where to roam;
I've heard of a city called heaven,
I've started to make it my home.
My mother has reached that pure glory,
My father's still walking in sin;
My brothers and sisters won't own me,
Because I am trying to get in.
Historical Context
"City Called Heaven" is among the most searching of the sorrow songs — the lament of a "poor pilgrim of sorrow," alone and comfortless in a hostile world, whose only hope is word of "a city called heaven." It was documented in the collecting work of the early twentieth century, including James Weldon Johnson's second anthology and John Wesley Work's American Negro Songs and Spirituals (1940), and it became a cornerstone of the concert-spiritual repertoire.
Scholars have noted that the song's melody is closely related to the Anglo-American folk hymn "I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger" / "Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow," an example of the musical exchange that ran in both directions across the lines of the segregated South. The spiritual's text and its place in the African American sorrow-song tradition are, however, distinctly its own.
Cultural Significance
The song is a portrait of profound isolation. The pilgrim is "tossed in this wide world alone," with "no hope for tomorrow." The third verse deepens the loneliness to the breaking point: the mother has died and reached glory, the father still walks "in sin," and the "brothers and sisters won't own me" — the singer is rejected even by family, cut off on every side, "because I am trying to get in."
For an enslaved people whose families were routinely torn apart by sale, and whose isolation was one of the system's deliberate cruelties, this portrait of the lone pilgrim carried unbearable weight — and the song's quiet insistence on pressing toward "a city called heaven" despite total abandonment is its act of defiance. The pilgrim has nothing and no one, yet still "started to make heaven my home." Hope persists not because circumstances justify it, but in spite of everything.
This is the paradox at the heart of the sorrow songs, which W.E.B. Du Bois identified: they are songs of unrelieved grief that are nonetheless, finally, songs of hope — "a faith in the ultimate justice of things."
Scholarly Notes
James Weldon Johnson placed "City Called Heaven" among the deepest of the sorrow songs, and the piece became a signature vehicle for twentieth-century concert artists — Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, and others — who drew on its stark loneliness and its unbroken thread of hope.
The melodic kinship with "Poor Wayfaring Stranger" is frequently discussed by scholars of American folk hymnody as evidence of the shared and contested musical inheritance of Black and white sacred song in the nineteenth-century South. This entry documents the song as it lives in the African American spiritual tradition, while noting that kinship honestly.
Du Bois's meditation on the sorrow songs in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) provides the essential interpretive frame for a song like this one: music born of suffering that refuses, nonetheless, to surrender hope.