"Kingdom Coming", or "The Year of Jubilo", is an American Civil War-era song written and composed by Henry Clay Work (1832–1884) in 1861. It was published by Root & Cady in 1862 and first advertised in April by the minstrel group Christy's Minstrels. Narrated by Black slaves on a Confederate plantation, "Kingdom Coming" recounts their impending freedom after their master disguises himself as a contraband and flees to avoid being captured by Union troops. It is a minstrel song, written in African American Vernacular English, spoken by slaves, and intended to be performed by blackface troupes.
Work was an avowed abolitionist and composed numerous pro-Union songs during the Civil War such as "Marching Through Georgia" (1865) and "Babylon is Fallen" (1863)—the sequel to "Kingdom Coming". The song portended the then-President Abraham Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, an executive order liberating all slaves in Confederate territory.
"Kingdom Coming" was one of the most successful Union songs, renowned as a favorite among Black Unionists and minstrel troupes. It amassed sheet music sales of 75,000 copies. The publisher George Frederick Root claimed that it was his firm's most successful piece "for nearly a year and a half" and "the most successful patriotic song in the West."[1] It prominently features as a lively instrumental in Ken Burns' eponymous documentary on the Civil War and in numerous twentieth-century cartoons, such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Billy Boy.