Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho

The story

"Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho", also sung as "Joshua Fought de Battle of Jericho" or simply "Joshua", is an African American spiritual. Its words tell the biblical story of the Battle of Jericho, in which Joshua led the Israelites against Canaan (Joshua 6:15–21). Like the words of many other spirituals, they may also point to escape from slavery, in the walls that come tumbling down. The critic Robert Cummings found its jaunty, spirited theme hardly like a product of the years before the Civil War, closer to ragtime or an early jazz musical, and heard in the plunging notes of its last phrase "a glorious sense of collapse, of triumph".

The song is believed to have been made by enslaved people in the first half of the 19th century; some references say that Jay Roberts copyrighted it in 1865. In 1882 it was printed in M. G. Slayton's Jubilee Songs and in Marshall W. Taylor's A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies. Early printed versions kept parts in dialect, such as "fit" for "fought". A rare variant, "Jacob fought the battle of Jericho", in which Jacob stands for the people of Israel, has been heard in the later 20th century; the two-syllable name fits the metre better than "Joshua", but the variant is almost never used.

The first recording was made by Harrod's Jubilee Singers on Paramount Records in 1922 (some sources say 1924), credited to Jay Roberts. Paul Robeson recorded it in 1925, and Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, Laurie London and Elvis Presley (1960) were among many who followed. Marshall Bartholomew arranged it in 1930; Morton Gould made it the basis of his Jericho Rhapsody for concert band in 1941; Ralph Flanagan and his orchestra recorded it as "Joshua" in New York City on 1 March 1950. The Kim Sisters sang it on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965 and the Golden Gate Quartet in Yugoslavia in 1967. Sister Thea Bowman, who learned it from her elders, recorded it in 1988 for Songs of My People, re-released in 2020 for the thirtieth anniversary of her death, and Hugh Laurie recorded it on his album Let Them Talk.

What it says

The song retells how Joshua's army brought down the walls of Jericho, a story of a besieged and seemingly unbreakable city falling to God's people. Sung by the enslaved, the falling walls could also stand for the end of bondage. The mood is lively, confident and triumphant.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.