Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Welcome back this week on The Daily Blade. We're looking at five of my

favorite hymns of all time, and we're digging into the lyrics and the biblical truce therein. Also,

I'm giving you my picks for the best versions of each of those songs. So today, we're looking at

the hymn down to the river to pray. So this isn't interesting him for many reasons, but one is that we don't

actually know precisely where it came from and when it was written. So it first popped up in print

in 1867 in a book called Slave Songs of the United States. The listed title was The Good Old Way,

and George H. Allen is actually credited with writing it down, but he is not the original author

of the lyrics nor the music.

So the generally held belief is that this was a song that originated with enslaved Africans in the mid-19th century here in America.

Thematically, the lyrics talk about spiritual deliverance, and some have actually speculated that encoded in the lyrics are references to literal bodily deliverance

from the scourge of chattel slavery and even the underground railroad. So it also highlighted a

popular form of communal worship in the American South and in Appalachia, and that was mass public

baptisms in rivers or lakes or ponds or whatever body water they could find. So this was not a

particularly popular hymn

for a long time, but in the year 2000, the song was released as part of one of the best-selling

soundtracks of all time, and that's for the movie, Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? And it was performed

by my absolute favorite female vocalist of all time, Alison Krause. So let me go ahead and

read the lyrics here. As I went down to the river

to pray, studying about that good old way, and who shall wear the starry crown, good Lord,

show me the way. Oh, sisters, let's go down. Let's go down. Let's go down. Come on down. Oh, sisters, let's go

down, down in the river to pray. As I went down in the river to pray, studying

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