Soon-a Will Be Done

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved as documented in the Hampton Institute Press tradition (Dett, 1927) and the Fisk-tradition Work 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

"Soon-a Will Be Done" — also commonly titled "Soon-a Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World" — belongs to the deep current of spirituals concerned with weariness and homegoing: the songs in which the singer, having borne what could be borne, looks across the boundary of this life to the one beyond it. Like "Deep River," "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," it sets a private grief inside a communal frame, so that the weariness of one becomes the weariness of all.

The song is documented in John Wesley Work II's 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. It is also documented in R. Nathaniel Dett's Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute (Hampton Collection, 1927) — the consolidated edition that built on the earlier Hampton work of Thomas P. Fenner, Frederic G. Rathbun, and Bessie Cleaveland and represented the Hampton tradition under Dett's leadership of the school's music department.

These early twentieth-century documentations preserve the traditional, public-domain form of the song. Its later, much more famous concert form is William L. Dawson's 1934 arrangement for the Tuskegee Institute Choir — a virtuosic four-voice setting that became a staple of African American concert and choral repertoire across the twentieth century. Dawson's arrangement is still under copyright; it is not the version documented in this entry. (See "Scholarly Notes" below.)

Cultural Significance

What "Soon-a Will Be Done" expresses, more than almost any other spiritual, is the simple physical fact of being tired. Soon-a will be done with the troubles of the world — and soon is the operative word. The song is not a complaint about the troubles, nor a promise to overcome them, nor a demand to end them. It is the recognition, made in song, that the singer can go on a little longer because the going on is finite. The end is in view.

The verses' specificity — I want to meet my mother, I want to meet my Jesus — locates the homegoing within particular relationships rather than within a generic afterlife. The singer is going home to specific people. The mother named first is significant. In a system that systematically separated families through sale, the loss of mothers was among the most common and devastating features of enslavement. To name the meeting with the mother as the first thing one wants to do beyond this life is to name what slavery had specifically taken — and to declare that what slavery took will be returned.

No more weeping and a-wailing gestures toward the apocalyptic vision of Revelation 21:4 — "and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying" — which is among the most frequently invoked scriptures in the spiritual tradition. The song's refusal of weeping is not denial; it is a faithful claim that weeping itself is finite, that grief has a horizon, that the long sound of mourning will at last be answered.

The song's emotional register — quiet, unhurried, settled — is part of its power. It does not perform its sorrow. It states what is true and rests in what is coming.

Scholarly Notes

A note on the Dawson arrangement: William L. Dawson (1899–1990), longtime director of the Tuskegee Institute Choir, published his celebrated arrangement of "Soon Ah Will Be Done" in 1934. That specific arrangement — with its dramatic four-voice writing, dynamic contrasts, and concert-hall scope — remains under copyright (Tuskegee Music Press / Neil A. Kjos Music Co.). It is not in the public domain.

This entry documents the traditional song as it appears in the pre-1928 public-domain Hampton and Fisk records — not Dawson's arrangement. The distinction matters: the underlying spiritual is the inheritance of the African American religious tradition and is freely available; the Dawson concert arrangement is a specific creative work whose performance, recording, and publication require attention to its rights. (See Rights & Usage for our broader policy on this distinction.)

See our bibliography for full details on the scholars and sources cited here. John Lovell Jr.'s Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) discusses "Soon-a Will Be Done" as part of the homegoing tradition within the broader spiritual canon — a tradition Lovell argues had to do not with quietism but with a precise theological insistence that the world's troubles are real and finite, both. Mark M. Smith and other historians of antebellum African American religious life have noted the centrality of family-reunion themes within the homegoing songs.

The song's recorded life is dominated by Dawson's arrangement and the Tuskegee, Fisk, and Spelman concert traditions that have made it iconic. Recordings by Mahalia Jackson and Mahalia's heirs have brought the song into gospel and concert spaces alike. For researchers and singers seeking to work with the traditional, public-domain form of the song, the Hampton 1927 (Dett) and Fisk 1915 (Work) sources are the best starting point.