Lyrics
The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in nineteenth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.
When Israel was in Egypt's land,
Let my people go;
Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go.
Refrain:
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt's land;
Tell old Pharaoh
To let my people go.
Thus saith the Lord, bold Moses said,
Let my people go;
If not I'll smite your first-born dead,
Let my people go.
No more shall they in bondage toil,
Let my people go;
Let them come out with Egypt's spoil,
Let my people go.
When Israel out of Egypt came,
Let my people go;
And left the proud oppressive land,
Let my people go.
Oh, 'twas a dark and dismal night,
Let my people go;
When Moses led the Israelites,
Let my people go.
Historical Context
"Go Down, Moses" is the earliest Negro spiritual to appear in published form. It was first printed in 1861 as a broadside by Reverend Lewis Lockwood, a missionary working among "contraband" — enslaved people who had escaped to Union lines near Fort Monroe, Virginia, at the start of the Civil War. Lockwood titled it The Song of the Contrabands: 'O Let My People Go' and sent it north, where it was published by the American Missionary Association. This makes "Go Down, Moses" a document not only of the spiritual tradition but of the first years of the Civil War and the immediate freedom struggle.
The biblical narrative it draws from — Moses confronting Pharaoh, demanding the release of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt — was the central typological framework of African American religious and political thought. The identification of enslaved Black Americans with the Israelites, and of the slaveholding class with Pharaoh, was not subtle. Slaveholders understood it clearly enough that teaching the Exodus story was, in many parts of the South, actively discouraged or forbidden. Enslaved communities taught it to one another anyway.
The Fisk Jubilee Singers popularized "Go Down, Moses" in their concert tours of the 1870s, where its explicit political content was both celebrated in the North and, at times, received uneasily by audiences unused to hearing such direct demands from the stage.
Cultural Significance
Where many spirituals work through indirection — layering earthly and heavenly meanings so that no single reading can be fixed — "Go Down, Moses" is unusually direct. "Tell old Pharaoh / To let my people go" is a demand, not a prayer. The song's subject is earthly liberation, achieved through divine mandate.
This directness made it one of the spirituals most obviously threatening to the slaveholding order. The identification of enslaved people with a chosen people whose God commands their liberation — and promises plagues on those who refuse — is a theology of resistance, not accommodation. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other freedom fighters of the antebellum era drew on precisely this typological framework.
The song's "double consciousness" — the simultaneous operation of spiritual and political meaning — is present in every verse. "No more shall they in bondage toil" can be read as a prophecy of heavenly rest or as a declaration of imminent emancipation; in the antebellum moment, it was almost certainly both.
James Weldon Johnson, in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925), described "Go Down, Moses" as "the most majestic" of all the spirituals — a song that matched the scale of the Exodus narrative with music of equivalent weight and gravity.
Scholarly Notes
The 1861 Lockwood broadside is a critical primary document. It confirms not only the song's existence before the Civil War but its currency among people who had just escaped slavery — a community whose survival depended on discernment and who chose to sing this song at that moment. Its preservation as one of the first published spirituals is a historical accident we are fortunate to have.
Dena Epstein's Sinful Tunes and Spirituals (1977) examines the song's early history and the conditions under which it was collected and published. Epstein is meticulous about the distinction between what can be documented and what is tradition or inference.
The Exodus typology in African American religious culture is extensively analyzed by Albert Raboteau in Slave Religion (1978), which remains the foundational scholarly text on the religious life of enslaved communities. Raboteau argues that Black American Christianity developed a distinct hermeneutic in which the Exodus narrative was read literally as well as spiritually — God had liberated enslaved people before and would do so again.
Paul Robeson's recording of "Go Down, Moses" brought the song to international audiences in the mid-twentieth century; his bass voice and explicitly political interpretive frame gave the song renewed urgency in the context of civil rights and anti-colonialism.