There's No Hiding Place Down There

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

"There's No Hiding Place Down There" draws on a striking scriptural image: the cry of those who, on the Day of Judgment, call to the mountains and rocks, "Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne" (Revelation 6:16; see also Hosea 10:8 and Luke 23:30). In the spiritual, the very rocks refuse the plea — there is nowhere left to hide when the final reckoning comes.

The song was carried by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and preserved in the collecting work of James Weldon Johnson and in R. Nathaniel Dett's Hampton edition. It belongs to the tradition's substantial body of Judgment-Day songs, which contemplated the day when all accounts would be settled.

Cultural Significance

At its surface, the song is a warning to the sinner: no evasion is possible, no concealment will hold, when God calls the world to account. But for an enslaved people, the theme of universal judgment carried a further, unspoken weight. The powerful of this world — those who bought and sold human beings, who profited from bondage — would themselves stand before a judge from whom no rock could hide them. The song's insistence that there is "no hiding place" was, for the powerless, a promise that the powerful would not escape.

The remarkable image of the burning rock that cries "I want to go to heaven as well as you" suggests a creation itself groaning toward redemption — even the stones long for deliverance. It is a moment of strange tenderness inside a song of judgment, and characteristic of the tradition's refusal to keep its categories tidy.

Scholarly Notes

James Weldon Johnson, in The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (1926), noted the dramatic vividness of the Judgment songs — their use of dialogue, personification, and sudden turns of image — as evidence of the tradition's poetic sophistication.

R. Nathaniel Dett preserved the song in a performing edition while emphasizing its folk character. Scholars of the tradition have observed that Judgment-Day spirituals, though framed as warnings to individual sinners, frequently carried an implicit social critique: the reassurance that earthly injustice would not be the final word.

The song has remained a powerful concert and congregational piece, its refrain among the most dramatically arresting in the repertoire.