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.
Refrain:
There is a balm in Gilead,
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead,
To heal the sin-sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged,
And think my work's in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit
Revives my soul again.
If you cannot preach like Peter,
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
And say He died for all.
Don't ever feel discouraged,
For Jesus is your friend;
And if you lack for knowledge,
He'll never fail to lend.
Historical Context
The title of this spiritual takes its language from the prophet Jeremiah, who cries out over the suffering of his people: "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" (Jeremiah 8:22). Gilead was a region east of the Jordan famous in the ancient world for a medicinal resin. Jeremiah's question is a lament — an anguished asking whether any cure exists for a broken nation.
The spiritual takes the prophet's despairing question and transforms it into an answer. Where Jeremiah asks whether there is a balm, the enslaved singers declare that there is — the very healing the world seems to lack is present and available. This reversal, turning scripture's grief into affirmation, is one of the tradition's most quietly radical acts of interpretation.
The song was preserved through the Fisk Jubilee Singers' repertoire and the collecting work of scholars including John Wesley Work, and it was widely anthologized in the early twentieth century.
Cultural Significance
"There Is a Balm in Gilead" is a song of consolation and endurance. Its verses speak directly to weariness — "sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work's in vain" — and answer it with the promise of revival. In a community whose labor was coerced and whose grief was constant, the refrain's insistence on healing was not sentimentality but survival.
The verse beginning "If you cannot preach like Peter" democratizes ministry: the humblest believer, unable to preach or pray with learned eloquence, can still "tell the love of Jesus." This affirmation of the spiritual worth of every person — regardless of station, education, or the world's estimation — sits at the heart of the theology the spirituals carried.
The song has remained a fixture of African American worship and of the broader hymn tradition, sung in churches across denominations and cited by preachers and writers — including Dr. Howard Thurman, whose meditations on the spirituals gave the song a lasting place in twentieth-century religious thought.
Scholarly Notes
James Weldon Johnson praised the spirituals' gift for compressing profound theology into simple, singable language, and "Balm in Gilead" is a model of that gift: an entire doctrine of grace and perseverance carried in four short lines.
Howard Thurman, in Deep River (1945) and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (1947), analyzed how the spirituals confronted suffering without denying it — holding grief and hope together rather than resolving one into the other. "Balm in Gilead" exemplifies this: it does not deny that the soul is "sin-sick" or the worker discouraged, but insists that healing is nonetheless real.
The song's melody, in its most familiar form, is notable for the way the refrain's gentle, rocking contour embodies the consolation the words describe.