We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

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

"We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" is among the oldest spirituals scholars have attempted to date with any precision. Estimates for its origin range from as early as 1750 to no later than 1825, placing its composition well within the deepest years of American chattel slavery. As with nearly every spiritual, no single author can be credited; the song took shape communally, through the oral tradition of enslaved men and women working, worshiping, and gathering wherever they were permitted to sing.

The song's earliest known printed appearance came in 1872, in Jubilee Songs: As Sung by the Jubilee Singers, of Fisk University, the slim but historic collection published under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. The Fisk Jubilee Singers — many of them formerly enslaved — carried the song from campground and cabin into concert halls across the United States and Europe, where it became one of the first spirituals widely adopted by white congregations as well as Black ones. It was collected again a generation later in Emily Hallowell's Calhoun Plantation Songs (1907), drawn from the singing of students at the Calhoun Colored School in Lowndes County, Alabama, and it appears as well in the Hampton Institute's Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students (1901). John Wesley Work, the Fisk scholar-musician, included it among the repertoire documented in Folk Song of the American Negro (1915).

The song's structure is itself a piece of historical evidence. It is built as call-and-response: a leader sings the first two lines of each stanza, the group answers, and all voices join together on the closing line, "Soldiers of the cross." This form reflects the work-song and ring-shout practices from which so many spirituals emerged — practices adapted, in part, because enslaved people were frequently forbidden to speak while laboring but were permitted, and sometimes required, to sing.

Cultural Significance

On its surface, "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" is a song of Christian discipleship, drawn from the vision granted to the patriarch Jacob in Genesis 28 — a ladder set up between earth and heaven, with angels ascending and descending upon it. Read this way, the "climbing" is the believer's steady progress toward holiness, "every round" a fresh degree of sanctification, and the "soldiers of the cross" a call to steadfast Christian service.

But as with so many spirituals, the song carried a second, more urgent register for those who first sang it. Scholars of the spiritual tradition have long argued that its central image of ascent — rising, round by round, toward a promised height — spoke just as directly to the hope of escape and elevation out of bondage as it did to personal piety. The repeated insistence that "every round goes higher, higher" offered a vocabulary of gradual, cumulative progress that could be sung openly in the presence of an overseer while carrying an entirely different meaning among the enslaved themselves. Because a ladder, unlike a river or a chariot, is climbed one step at a time, some scholars read the song as an especially apt vessel for coded language: it could describe the incremental, careful work of gaining trust, information, or distance needed to escape toward freedom.

The song's afterlife has been unusually long and varied. Paul Robeson recorded a stark a cappella version that became one of his signature performances. In the 1930s and 1940s, the American labor movement adopted the melody for organizing songs, altering the lyrics to fit whatever industry or struggle was at hand — a testament to how readily the song's structure of collective, escalating resolve could be repurposed. Pete Seeger performed and popularized it for folk revival audiences, later adding a widely sung feminist variant, "We are dancing Sarah's circle," and Bruce Springsteen recorded a version for We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006). Bernice Johnson Reagon's 1987 a cappella recording, featured in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War (1990), returned the song to a register closer to its origins — unaccompanied voices carrying a song built for endurance.

Scholarly Notes

The Fisk Jubilee Singers' 1872 songbook remains the earliest documented print source for "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder," and its inclusion there — alongside "Steal Away" and other songs now central to the American spiritual canon — helped establish the spiritual as a genre worthy of serious musical publication rather than mere curiosity. The song's subsequent appearance in both the Hampton and Calhoun Plantation collections demonstrates its wide geographic circulation across the postbellum South, from Tennessee to coastal Alabama, suggesting a song that had already achieved broad currency well before it was ever written down.

Scholars of the spiritual tradition frequently group "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" among songs whose surface piety and coded meaning cannot be neatly separated — a hallmark of what John Lovell Jr., in Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972), described as the spirituals' capacity to "speak two languages at once, and speak them well." The song's call-and-response architecture, still audible in its most traditional performances, is itself treated by ethnomusicologists as direct evidence of its origin in communal, participatory worship rather than composed hymnody.

The song's durability — from antebellum fields to Reconstruction-era songbooks, from the labor halls of the 1930s to the folk revival and the Civil Rights Movement — makes it one of the clearest examples of a spiritual whose meaning was never fixed, but was instead continually remade by each generation that needed it.