Traditional African American Spiritual Melody

The melody of Do, Lord, Remember Me comes from the African American spiritual tradition rather than from a securely identified individual composer. As with the text, oral transmission produced variant musical forms. Edward Boatner’s 1927 collection contains the earliest located printed version in an African American source closely related to the modern song, while Mary Allen Grissom in 1930 and Edward Avery McIlhenny in 1933 preserved related but musically distinct forms.

This variation is characteristic of spirituals transmitted through community performance: melody, rhythm, repeated material, and improvised details could develop without a single authoritative score. John W. Work later included the spiritual in American Negro Songs and Spirituals in 1940, helping document another stage of its printed history.

Modern tune indexes treat the underlying melody as a public-domain African American spiritual, usually in irregular meter. The name DITMUS refers specifically to William Farley Smith’s later adaptation and arrangement used in The United Methodist Hymnal and related books. Smith did not originate the traditional spiritual melody, and his copyrighted setting should be distinguished from the public-domain source tradition.