Let Us Break Bread Together

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

"Let Us Break Bread Together" is a communion spiritual — a song of the Lord's Supper, of bread broken and wine shared among the gathered faithful. It became widely known after its publication in James Weldon Johnson's The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926), and it was later included in John Wesley Work's American Negro Songs and Spirituals (1940).

Some scholars have connected the song to the tidewater region of Virginia and to the worship of enslaved Anglicans and other early Black Christian communities of the Mid-Atlantic, though its precise origins, like those of most spirituals, are not documented with certainty and remain a matter of tradition and inference rather than established fact.

Cultural Significance

The song's refrain gathers the community to its knees "together" — the word carries the whole meaning. Communion, the shared meal of the church, is here an act of unity among people who kneel as equals. For an enslaved community forced apart in so many ways — families separated by sale, worship driven into secrecy, gatherings surveilled and restricted — the vision of breaking bread together was itself a quiet assertion of communal belonging.

The striking image of turning "my face to the rising sun" has invited much interpretation. It evokes the East, the direction of sunrise and of the resurrection; some have heard in it an echo of older African spiritual practices oriented toward the sun. Whatever its deepest roots, the gesture places the kneeling believer in a posture of hope, facing the light that rises, as the plea "O Lord, have mercy on me" rises with it.

The song's tenderness and universality have carried it far beyond its origins, into the communion liturgies of many denominations.

Scholarly Notes

James Weldon Johnson's publication of the song in 1926 was decisive in bringing it to wide attention, and it is chiefly through his anthology that the song entered the broader hymn tradition.

The song has been interpreted by many of the great concert artists — Paul Robeson sang it as a solemn hymn, Marian Anderson as a subtle rebuke to segregation, and later artists as an explicit call to unity across the color line. Jessye Norman's recording is among the most celebrated, part of a lineage that has made the song a standing invitation to gather across every division.

Scholars caution against over-precise claims about the song's sunrise imagery and African antecedents; the connection is suggestive and often discussed, but not documented from primary sources — an example of the interpretive care the tradition's history demands.