Contrabands at Fort Monroe sometime before July 1862. White people who reported on the song presumed it was composed by them. It became the first spiritual known to be recorded in sheet music.

While the Reverend Lewis Lockwood, the chaplain of the Contrabands, was visiting Fortress Monroe in 1861, he heard runaway enslaved people singing the song, transcribed what he heard, and eventually published it in the National Anti-Slavery Standard.