Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

The story

"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", also sung as "Motherless Child", is a traditional spiritual that goes back to the era of slavery in the United States. One early performance was by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor made it the first movement of his Trio in E minor in 1893, and Paul Robeson recorded it several times from 1926 onwards. In 1942 the Wings Over Jordan Choir recorded it for Columbia Masterworks, presenting it, and the spirituals as a whole, as American classical music.

It was often heard during the civil rights movement, and it has been recorded in many forms. Mahalia Jackson recorded it in 1956, and Odetta sang it at Carnegie Hall on 8 April 1960; her version was heard in Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). On 15 August 1969 Richie Havens opened the Woodstock festival with a version he called "Freedom (Motherless Child)". Thea Bowman, a Black Catholic religious sister, recorded it in 1988 and sang it the next year at a meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, while giving a speech on Black Catholic history and experience, shortly before her death from cancer. The soprano Barbara Hendricks sang it when she received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2002, and John Legend sang it at the Hope for Haiti Now telethon in 2010.

Composers have built on it too: George Walker quoted it in his Piano Sonata No. 4, and Olly Wilson based Sometimes (1976), for tenor and tape, on it. Versions range from Boney M.'s disco "Motherless Child" (1977) to Van Morrison's, in which, according to his biographer Brian Hinton, the mother he misses is Ireland, and Ghostface Killah's hip-hop "Motherless Child" (1996).

What it says

A song of pain and despair, in which the singer compares his hopelessness to that of a child torn from its parents. In one reading the word "sometimes" holds a measure of hope: at other times, at least, the singer does not feel so lost.

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.