All My Trials

“All My Trials” is a folk song which became popular during the social protest movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. Alternative titles it has been recorded under include “Bahamian Lullaby” and “All My Sorrows.” The origins of the song are unclear, as it appears to not have been documented in any musicological or historical records (after the first commercial recording was released (as “Bahamian Lullaby”) on Bob Gibson’s 1956 debut album Offbeat Folksongs. In the first commercial release on the 1956 album Offbeat Folksongs, Gibson did not mention the history of the song. The next two artists to release it, Cynthia Gooding and Billy Faie, both wrote in their albums’ liner notes that they each learned the song from Erik Darling. Gooding explained it was “supposed to be a white spiritual that went to the British West Indies and returned with the lovely rhythm of the Islands,” presumably as told to her by Darling. Faier wrote that he heard Darling sing the song “four or five times in spring 1954,” when Darling would have been performing with his folk group The Tarriers. However, bibliographic folk song indexes, such as the Traditional Ballad Index[9] do not mention the Bahamas as an origin, listing it as unknown. The Joan Baez Songbook (published 1964; Baez released the song as “All My Trials” in 1960) suggests it began as a pre-Civil War era American Southern gospel song, which was introduced to the Bahamas where it became a lullaby, and was forgotten in the US until it was brought back from the Bahamas and popularized during the roots revival. The song tells the story of a mother on her death bed, comforting her children, “Hush little baby, don’t you cry./You know your mama’s bound to die,” because, as she explains, “All my trials, Lord,/Soon be over.” The message — that no matter how bleak the situation seemed, the struggle would “soon be over” — propelled the song to the status of an anthem, recorded by many of the leading artists of the era. The song is usually classified as a Spiritual because of its biblical and religious imagery. There are references to the “Lord”, “a little book” with a message of “liberty”, “brothers”, “religion”, “paradise”, “pilgrims” and the “tree of life” awaiting her after her hardships, referred to as “trials”. There is an allegory of the river Jordan, the crossing of which represents the Christian experience of death as something which “…chills the body but not the soul.” The river/death allegory was popularized by John Bunyan in his classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the wording echoes the teaching of Jesus, to “…fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” (Matthew 10:28)[original research?]