In the video above, The Nathaniel Dett Chorale performs a beautiful rendition of “Cheer the Weary Traveller”–one of the many “sorrow songs” referenced in W.E.B. Du Bois’ landmark book, The Souls of Black Folk.
If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below – swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous treble and darkening bass. My children, my children, are singing to the sunshine, and thus they sing,
Let us cheer the weary traveller,
Cheer the weary traveller,
Let us cheer the weary traveller
Along the heavenly way
And the traveller girds himself, and sets his face toward the Morning, and goes his way.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
