Episode Details

This episode follows a single melody across more than two centuries. It began as a call and response tune at frontier camp meetings, built to be learned by ear and sung by huge crowds. In 1861, soldiers of the Tiger Battalion at Fort Warren in Massachusetts set it to morbid verses mocking a Scottish comrade named John Brown, who shared his name with the executed abolitionist. Officers hated the song, but it spread through the Union ranks.

In November 1861, Julia Ward Howe, whose husband Samuel Gridley Howe belonged to the Secret Six, heard troops sing it near Washington. At the urging of James Freeman Clarke she wrote new verses before dawn at the Willard Hotel and sold the poem to the Atlantic Monthly for $4. Her longer lines forced singers into the dotted rhythms that give the hymn its drive. The tune later reached Marian Anderson's 1953 broadcast, a Grammy winning Mormon Tabernacle Choir record, the funerals and tributes of the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech, and soccer stadiums.

• The Mormon Tabernacle Choir's 1960 recording reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Barred by CBS from naming John F. Kennedy after his assassination, Judy Garland sang the hymn on her show instead.
• Andy Williams' a cappella version from Robert F. Kennedy's funeral also reached the charts.
• Tottenham Hotspur fans dressed as angels and sang its chorus in 1961 after a Polish paper called their players no angels.
• Parodies include labor union marches, a Finnish hockey chant, and a Swedish drinking song about pub prices in Gothenburg.