Give Me Jesus

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

"Give Me Jesus" is a quiet, deeply personal spiritual of devotion and surrender. Unlike the great communal shouts of the tradition, it is intimate in scale — the voice of a single soul marking the passage of a day and a life. It was documented in the Hampton collection Cabin and Plantation Songs (1874) and preserved in R. Nathaniel Dett's later Hampton edition, and it appears among the songs James Weldon Johnson gathered in his second volume of spirituals.

The song's structure follows the hours: morning, midnight, and the hour of death. Each stanza situates the same unshakeable choice within a different moment, so that the whole of existence — waking, the depths of night, and dying — is folded into a single act of devotion.

Cultural Significance

The refrain, "You may have all this world, give me Jesus," is a radical renunciation. For a people who possessed almost nothing the law recognized as their own — not their labor, not their families, not their bodies — the declaration inverts the terms of the world entirely. What the powerful prize, the singer surrenders freely; what cannot be bought or seized, the singer claims.

There is profound dignity in this. The song refuses to let the material deprivations of slavery define the value of a life. By choosing Jesus over "all this world," the singer asserts a wealth that no enslaver could touch and no auction could price.

The final stanza, "when I come to die," gives the song its gravity. Death, so often in the spirituals a door to freedom and reunion, is met here not with fear but with the same steady refrain — a devotion carried unbroken to the very end.

Scholarly Notes

R. Nathaniel Dett, in editing Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro (1927), was careful to preserve the meditative, unhurried character of songs like "Give Me Jesus," which resist the concert flourish and depend for their power on restraint and sincerity.

James Weldon Johnson observed that some of the most affecting spirituals are also the simplest — songs whose emotional force comes not from dramatic imagery but from the direct, repeated statement of a single conviction. "Give Me Jesus" belongs to this category.

The song has had an unusually long and continuous life in African American worship, and its plainness has made it a favorite for solo interpretation, from the concert stage to the sanctuary.