Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

This article is about the Negro spiritual. For the blues song, see Motherless Child Blues.
Original score of "Motherless Child" by William E. Barton, D.D., 1899.

"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", also "Motherless Child", is a traditional spiritual. It dates back to the era of slavery in the United States.

An early performance of the song was in the 1870s by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.[1][2] Commonly heard during the Civil rights movement in the United States,[3] it has many variations and has been recorded widely.

  1. ^ "Blue Gene" Tyranny, "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" article, AllMusic
  2. ^ Barton, Hymns of the Slave and the Freedman, p.17 ("Not very long ago I attended a concert given by a troupe of jubilee singers, whose leader was a member of the original Fisk company. Toward the end of the programme he announced that a recently arrived singer in his troupe from Mississippi had brought a song that her grandparents sang in slave times, which he counted the saddest and most beautiful of song of slavery. It was a mutilated version of Aunt Dinah's song ['Motherless Child' or 'I feel like I'd never been borned.']")
  3. ^ McGill, Ann (19 February 2020). "Music of the Movement: A Lowcountry gospel singer explains the songs of the Civil Rights era". Live 5 WCSC. Retrieved 2020-03-13.