Sinner, Please Don't Let This Harvest Pass

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

"Sinner, Please Don't Let This Harvest Pass" is a spiritual of exhortation and warning, built on the biblical image of the harvest — the season of gathering, and, in the Gospels, a figure for the final ingathering of souls (Matthew 9:37–38, John 4:35). The song was carried by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and anthologized by James Weldon Johnson.

Its plea is set against the passing of time: the harvest is now, and it will not last. To "let the harvest pass" is to miss the season of grace, to be left ungathered when the reaping is done.

Cultural Significance

The song belongs to the tradition's body of invitation and warning — the music of the revival and the praise house, calling the unconverted to respond before it is too late. But its tone is not one of thundering condemnation. The word that governs the refrain is "please." The singer does not threaten the sinner; the singer pleads with them. The urgency comes wrapped in tenderness, the warning delivered as an act of love.

This gentleness reflects the communal character of the spirituals' evangelism. The "sinner" being addressed was not an abstract enemy but a member of the community — a neighbor, a family member, someone whose soul the whole gathering longed to see saved. To plead "please don't let this harvest pass" was to care for another's eternal welfare as one's own.

The interpolated verses draw on the broader stock of the tradition — "my God is a mighty man of war" and the battle of Jericho, the triumphant assurance "I know that my Redeemer lives" (Job 19:25) — weaving the warning together with declarations of God's power and faithfulness.

Scholarly Notes

James Weldon Johnson placed the exhortation songs within the revival tradition of the invisible church, where conversion was the central communal drama and songs like this one carried the emotional weight of the appeal.

The song has attracted the attention of major twentieth-century Black composers. Margaret Bonds arranged it for concert performance, and it was included by Florence Price and others among the spirituals they set for the recital stage — part of the movement to establish the spiritual as a form of concert art.

Jessye Norman's performance of the song, in her celebrated concerts of spirituals, brought its pleading tenderness to wide audiences and affirmed its standing in the concert repertoire.