Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

For all our celebration in hymns from Isaac Watts onwards of the global fellowship of all Christians in praise (171 and many more), it has taken until the late 20th c for ‘white’ Christendom to welcome into its repertoire expressions of devotion other than its own, as opposed to exporting ‘missionary’ products overseas. Not surprisingly, and as with black missionaries themselves, this welcome has not been universal; some find it threatening. But this N American ‘spiritual’ has been among the first to gain entry to mainstream hymnals via school songbooks or less formal collections. Like others, it communicates the impact of the cross and resurrection in a developing series of repeated questions rather than in paragraphed propositions. Though its origins are much older, its first known publication was in William E Barton’s Old Plantation Hymns of 1899; a melody version appeared in JW and FJ Work’s Folk Songs of the American Negro, 1907. Even those titles may warn us that such genuine but anonymous folksongs have always been in danger of being ‘degutted’ or tamed by sophisticated European or concert-style arrangements. But it was also sung by white N Americans in Tennessee’s upper Cumberland region. Donald Hustad, among others, suggests that it ‘may have had earlier British antecedents’. The selection of stzs varies in different books. The tune WERE YOU THERE was arranged by Francis Westbrook for The School Hymn Book of the Methodist Church in 1950 (probably the song’s first publication in Britain, with 2 stzs only). It appeared later in Peter Smith’s 1967 Faith, Folk and Clarity and has been used widely since then. Cyril Taylor’s comment (1984) was ‘What is one to say? … one of the great melodies of all time. Neither words nor melody convey any suggestion at all of having been thought out and written down.’ So the currently popular mode of pauses and flourishes is not the only way to treat this music.