Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved as documented in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American hymnals and Fisk publications. 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

"Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho" is one of the most widely sung African American spirituals, drawing its narrative directly from the Book of Joshua, chapter 6 — the seven-day siege of the walled city of Jericho, ended by the trumpets of the Israelites and the shout of the people, at which the walls fall and the city is taken. Like "Go Down, Moses," it locates its singers within the narrative of Israel — but where "Go Down, Moses" demands liberation, "Joshua" celebrates the moment liberation is achieved through divine action and collective shout.

The song's earliest known publication is in Marshall W. Taylor's A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies (Cincinnati, 1883), one of the first hymnals compiled by a Black editor for Black congregations within the Methodist Episcopal Church. Taylor, a minister born to free Black parents in Kentucky in 1846, gathered songs he considered authentic to the spiritual tradition and published them with explicit theological framing for African American worship.

The song entered the Fisk Jubilee Singers' repertoire in the early twentieth century and was published by Frederick J. Work in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (2nd ed., 1904). John Wesley Work II included it in Folk Song of the American Negro (1915), the first scholarly study of the spirituals authored by a Black scholar working from inside the Fisk tradition.

The Fisk recordings made by Work and his colleagues helped fix one widely sung version of the song, but oral variants — different verse orderings, different opening lines, different distributions of refrain — circulated throughout the South long before any of these printed editions.

Cultural Significance

The walls of Jericho, in African American religious imagination, were never only the walls of a Bronze Age city. They were the walls of slavery, the walls of Jim Crow, the walls of every system that had been built to keep a people contained. The song's theology — that the walls fall not by storm but by faithful procession, by the trumpet's blast, by the shout of the people — is a theology of collective patience and collective action joined together.

The figure of Joshua himself is significant. Joshua, in the biblical narrative, is the leader who completes what Moses began: Moses leads the people out of Egypt, but Joshua leads them into the promised land. The spiritual's emphasis on Joshua over Moses — "There's none like good old Joshua" — implicitly announces that the work of liberation is unfinished, that another leader is still to come, that the walls have not yet all fallen. In the antebellum context, this announcement was as politically charged as anything in the tradition.

The shout in the song is not metaphorical. The "ring shout" of the African American religious tradition — a circular, rhythmic, communal worship practice rooted in West African spirituality and preserved especially in the Sea Islands — is the cultural matrix in which "Joshua" was sung. When the singers shout and the walls come tumbling down, the song is also describing the ring shout itself: the moment in worship when the gathered community's collective voice and motion becomes the agent of transformation.

The song's scriptural confidence — Joshua's "the battle is in my hand" — is also doing theological work. It places the agency of liberation within the human leader, called and authorized by God but acting decisively. In a culture in which enslaved people were told daily that their hands held nothing, this verse asserted otherwise.

Scholarly Notes

Marshall W. Taylor's 1883 Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies is an underused primary source. Taylor's introduction is one of the earliest African American editorial frames for the spiritual tradition — written by a Black minister to serve Black congregations, not white concert audiences — and it preserves variant texts that did not always survive into the better-known Fisk and Hampton editions. The Internet Archive's digitization makes Taylor's work freely accessible.

See our bibliography for full details on the sources cited in this entry. Frederick J. Work and John Wesley Work II's documentation of the Fisk repertoire built on the foundation laid by their family's involvement with Fisk going back to the original 1871 ensemble. Their New Jubilee Songs and Folk Song of the American Negro preserve a Fisk reading of the song shaped by decades of concert performance and pedagogical refinement.

John Lovell Jr.'s Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) — at over seven hundred pages, the most comprehensive single study of the spiritual tradition — treats "Joshua" as a paradigm case of what Lovell calls the "double-meaning" tradition: scriptural narratives whose application to the singers' own circumstances was so clear that the slaveholding class could not always tell whether to forbid them or accept them as harmless piety.

The song became central to the African American concert tradition through the recordings and performances of Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson, the Golden Gate Quartet, and Mahalia's countless successors. Its melodic shape — the descending refrain, the dramatic pause before "and the walls came tumblin' down" — has become so familiar in American culture that the phrase functions as shorthand for the moment a long-resisting structure finally gives way.