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.
Refrain:
Go tell it on the mountain,
Over the hills and everywhere;
Go tell it on the mountain
That Jesus Christ is born.
While shepherds kept their watching
O'er silent flocks by night,
Behold throughout the heavens
There shone a holy light.
The shepherds feared and trembled
When lo! above the earth
Rang out the angel chorus
That hailed our Savior's birth.
Down in a lowly manger
The humble Christ was born,
And God sent us salvation
That blessed Christmas morn.
Historical Context
"Go Tell It on the Mountain" is an African American spiritual whose refrain reaches back into the antebellum oral tradition. It survives today largely through the work of John Wesley Work Jr., the pioneering Fisk University scholar who — with his brother Frederick J. Work — collected and published spirituals at the turn of the twentieth century. The song appeared in their New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the American Negro (1907), its first publication.
Work is often credited with shaping the verses into their now-familiar form while preserving the traditional refrain. He was the first African American to collect and publish Negro spirituals systematically, and his labor — like that of the Fisk Jubilee Singers he directed — is the reason a great many of these songs survived at all.
Cultural Significance
The song's commission — "go tell it on the mountain... and everywhere" — turns the Nativity into a mandate to proclaim. The mountain is the place of loud, public announcement; the good news is not to be whispered but shouted "over the hills and everywhere."
For a community whose worship was often forced into secrecy and whose voices were suppressed, the imperative to tell, loudly and everywhere, carried its own charge. The song claims the right to proclaim — to occupy the mountaintop and announce a truth that the powers of the world could not contain. The birth of "the humble Christ" in "a lowly manger" also reaffirmed the tradition's persistent theology: that God enters the world among the lowly, not the mighty.
At Fisk University, students carried the song through the campus before dawn on Christmas morning, moving from building to building — a living practice that embodied the song's own command to go and tell.
Scholarly Notes
The distinction between the traditional refrain and the composed verses is important. The refrain "Go tell it on the mountain" is part of the older oral tradition; the narrative verses reached their standard form through John Wesley Work Jr.'s published arrangement. This entry documents the traditional spiritual as preserved in the Work brothers' public-domain collections.
John Wesley Work Jr.'s scholarship, including Folk Song of the American Negro (1915), placed the spirituals within a framework of serious study and cultural pride, arguing for their recognition as authentic folk art. James Weldon Johnson's later anthologies carried that argument to a still wider audience.
The song has become one of the most widely sung of all Christmas spirituals, recorded across gospel, folk, and popular traditions, and performed each year in churches and concert halls around the world.