The Song That Woke Me Up
Field Note: On hearing what has always been there
I remember the excitement of that new CD. It was early July, heading toward the Fourth. Long drives. Windows down. It was a soundtrack for the highway. I wanted patriotic songs stacked back-to-back. I wanted to feel anchored to something bigger than myself.
I remember driving through rural Arkansas while the track list rolled on from song to song.
The Star-Spangled Banner.
God Bless America.
Then came a song I did not recognise.
I expected a familiar swell. Instead, I found myself sitting up straighter. This was not background music. The melody was demanding. The words were honest. They were hopeful, but the hope was not cheap. I wondered how I had never heard it before.
The song was Lift Every Voice and Sing1. It was written in 1900. It is a hymn. It is a prayer. It is a song of faith shaped by suffering and carried forward by hope. It had been around for a century, and yet it had missed me entirely. Until that day.
It was originally written for a school assembly. James Weldon Johnson wrote it for his students to sing for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Five hundred children sang it. It was not a concert hall or a protest march. It was a school hall filled with young voices being trusted with something weighty.
Words about pain and perseverance were deliberately placed into the mouths of the next generation. That detail has never left me.
These days, many people first hear the song during the Super Bowl. Since 2020, it has been included in the pre-game ceremony: a moment of pause before the noise. It is a moment that, for some, has become a point of modern friction, a signal to tune out before the game begins.
I have noticed a growing reflex in our time. If something is unfamiliar or stretches us, we reach for labels that let us stop curiosity in its tracks. If we can categorise a thing as “merely political”, we feel justified in turning it off. We create a shortcut to avoid the discomfort of hearing something new, unaware that we might be bypassing a gift.
But not everything unfamiliar is a threat. Sometimes, listening is the beginning of an awakening.
Lift Every Voice and Sing is not an argument. It is a hymn that refuses to forget the past and refuses to surrender the future. It names pain without glorifying it. It speaks hope without denying reality. The final verse is a prayer, not a slogan. It asks God to steady weary feet and keep a people faithful to what is true.
What struck me then, and still does now, is the song’s lack of vitriol. It doesn’t use the language of the “culture war.” It uses the language of the sanctuary. It reminds me of Psalm 85, where truth and mercy meet, and faith refuses to forget what has been endured.
It invites us to be awake to a history that belongs to all of us, and a faith that is big enough to hold both our triumphs and our deepest laments. It suggests that God has always been at work in stories larger and more complex than our own.
On that Arkansas highway, I was not looking to be challenged. I just wanted to sing along to songs I knew. What I received instead was a gift. It was a reminder that faith can tell the truth and still find a reason to sing.
Some songs entertain. Some songs distract. A few do something better.
They wake us up.
I am grateful that this one did that for me.
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.