Keep Your Hand on the Plow

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

"Keep Your Hand on the Plow" takes its central image from the words of Jesus in Luke 9:62: "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." The plow was also, for an enslaved agricultural people, an instrument of daily labor — so the song fuses scripture and the reality of the field into a single image of steadfast forward effort.

The song was documented by John Wesley Work in his early scholarship at Fisk, anthologized by James Weldon Johnson, and later collected by folklorists John and Alan Lomax, who recorded numerous variants across the South. In its "Gospel Plow" and "Hold On" forms it circulated in both sacred and folk contexts.

Cultural Significance

The song's whole meaning is endurance. "Hold on" — the refrain repeated over and over — is a command to persevere, to keep working the row and never look back. For a people whose freedom would come, if it came at all, only through unbroken struggle across generations, the discipline of holding on was itself a form of faith.

The line "wouldn't take nothing for my journey now" declares that the hardship of the road is worth its cost — that the journey toward freedom and salvation, whatever its price, is not for sale. This is the theology of a people who had every reason to despair and refused to.

The song's afterlife is one of the most remarkable in the tradition. During the Civil Rights Movement, activists reworked "Keep Your Hand on the Plow / Hold On" into "Eyes on the Prize," changing the verses to speak of the freedom struggle directly — of the movement's martyrs, its jailings, its unshakeable resolve. In that form it became one of the defining anthems of the movement, its old command to "hold on" now aimed squarely at the prize of freedom and equality.

Scholarly Notes

John and Alan Lomax's field recordings preserved the song in its folk and work-song contexts, documenting variants that revealed how fluidly its verses moved and recombined — a hallmark of songs sustained in oral tradition.

James Weldon Johnson identified perseverance as one of the great recurring themes of the spirituals, and "Hold On" as among its clearest and most concentrated expressions.

The transformation into "Eyes on the Prize" is extensively documented in histories of the freedom-song tradition, and the PBS documentary series of that name (1987) took its title from this lineage — a testament to how directly the spirituals fed the music and the moral vocabulary of the twentieth-century movement for civil rights.