Rights & Usage

All original prose on Deep River — including historical context, cultural significance narratives, and scholarly notes — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

You may: share, adapt, and build upon this content for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to Deep River and link back to the original, and provided any derivative works are shared under the same license.

You may not: use this content for commercial purposes without explicit written permission.

The lyrics published on Deep River are sourced from nineteenth-century public domain collections — primarily the Fisk Jubilee, Hampton, and similar pre-1928 publications. The traditional songs themselves are in the public domain.

Important: arrangements are not the same as the traditional song. A specific published arrangement of a traditional spiritual may still be under copyright, even though the underlying melody and text are in the public domain. Harry T. Burleigh's arrangement of "Deep River" (1916) is a well-known example — that arrangement is still protected.

Deep River documents only the traditional, public-domain versions of songs. If you intend to perform, record, or publish a specific arrangement, consult the rights holder for that arrangement separately.

Audio and video on Deep River are embedded from YouTube using YouTube's standard embed functionality. These embeds are reference links to recordings hosted and licensed by their respective rights holders on YouTube — Deep River does not host or claim any rights to the recordings themselves.

If you believe an embedded recording infringes on your rights, please contact the hosting platform (YouTube) directly and notify us so we can update or remove the embed.

If you use Deep River in academic work, we suggest citing it as follows:

For individual song entries, include the song title and the URL of the specific entry page. For example: