Every Time I Feel the Spirit

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.

Historical Context

"Every Time I Feel the Spirit" belongs to the broad body of antebellum spirituals born in the invisible church — the secret worship gatherings enslaved African Americans held in brush arbors and cabins, away from the surveillance of enslavers. Its imagery of the mountain, fire, and smoke draws on the theophany of Exodus 19, in which God descends upon Mount Sinai "in fire," and the mountain is wrapped in smoke.

Like most spirituals, the song was carried in oral tradition for decades before it was ever notated. It entered the written record through the collecting work of the late nineteenth century — the Fisk Jubilee Singers' repertoire and the scholarship of John Wesley Work at Fisk University, who documented it as part of his effort to preserve the tradition as serious folk art. James Weldon Johnson later included it among the spirituals he anthologized in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925).

Cultural Significance

The song describes conversion as a physical, overwhelming event — the Spirit "moving in my heart" is not metaphor but felt experience. In the worship life of the enslaved community, the moment of being "struck" by the Spirit was the central religious experience, the sign that a person had "come through" to salvation. The refrain's response to that experience is disciplined and communal: "I will pray."

The verses layer the sacred and the earthly in the characteristic manner of the tradition. The "Jordan river" that "runs right cold" is at once the biblical boundary of the Promised Land, the river of death, and — in the coded geography of the spirituals — a real river marking the passage toward freedom. The "one train on this track" that "runs to heaven and right back" anticipates the gospel-train imagery that recurs throughout the repertoire.

Scholarly Notes

John Wesley Work's Folk Song of the American Negro (1915) situates songs like this one within a religious culture that made no sharp division between worship and daily life. Work, whose family was central to the preservation of the Fisk repertoire, argued that the spirituals were the authentic art of a people and deserved study on those terms.

James Weldon Johnson, in the preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), emphasized the rhythmic and structural sophistication of songs in this call-and-response form, where a fixed refrain frames improvised or interchangeable verses — a structure that allowed the congregation to participate fully and the lead singer to draw freely on a shared stock of imagery.

The song remains a staple of the concert-spiritual and gospel repertoires, and its arrangements by twentieth-century composers have kept it in continuous performance for more than a century.