Nobody knows the trouble I see

Nobody knows the trouble I see. African American spiritual*.

This is found in the a post-Civil War book, immediately following Emancipation, entitled Slave Songs of the United States (1867), edited by the abolitionists William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. It began ‘Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had’. It was described as ‘a favourite in the colored schools of Charleston in 1865’ (p. 55). A variant to ‘I’ve had’ is noted as ‘I see’, which has become better known. The Chorus was as follows:

Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had,
Nobody knows but Jesus,
Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had,
Glory hallelu!

The stanzas were:

One morning I was a-walking down, O yes, Lord!
I saw some berries a-hanging down, O yes, Lord!

I pick de berry and I suck de juice, O yes, Lord!
Just as sweet as the honey in de comb, O yes, Lord!

Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down,
Sometimes I’m almost on de groun’.

What make ole Satan hate me so?
Because he got me once and he let me go.

In UMH this appears in an adaptation (modifying the language) by William Farley Smith*, dated 1986. This uses the two final stanzas above, with one in between:

Although you see me going long so, Oh yes, Lord!
I have my troubles here below, Oh yes, Lord!

Farley Smith’s arrangement of the music is called DUBOIS, after W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), the great pioneer of Civil Rights. 

An alternative text is found in Folk Song of the American Negro, edited by John Wesley Work (II)* (1907, p. 50), where it is classed among the ‘Sorrow Songs’. In that text it has three verses. It begins with the Chorus:

Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord,
Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows the trouble I see, Lord,
Nobody knows but Jesus.

This is followed by the stanza:

Mother, won’t you pray for me: (x 3)
And help me to drive old Satan away.

There is one more stanza, beginning ‘Preacher, won’t you pray for me’.

The version sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers* (Marsh/Loudin, 1898, p. 159) has four stanzas, with slight variations in wording in the Chorus. The stanzas were: 

‘Brothers, will you pray for me, &c.’

‘Sisters, will you pray for me, &c.’

‘Mothers, will you pray for me, &c.’

‘Preachers, will you pray for me, &c.’

Commenting on songs such as this, John Wesley Work (II) wrote ‘The sorrows of slavery pierced his heart and it poured itself out in such lamentations...Songs of this kind express the tragedies of slavery. They are the depths of his music. Curiously enough, the slave held Satan accountable for all his troubles’ (Work, 1907, p. 27). 

This is the version in Lift Every Voice and Sing II: an African American hymnal (1993). There are many other versions, with different first lines, in other books in the USA. 

A further use of the phrase ‘Nobody knows the trouble I see’ refers to the problem of seeking Jesus. In A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies, edited by Marshall W. Taylor (Cincinnati, 1883), it is found as a Chorus in ‘Hunting my Redeemer’ (pp. 105-6): 

Nobody knows the trouble I see, the trouble I see, the trouble I see, -
Nobody knows the trouble I see, Hunting my Redeemer. 

The power of this spiritual lies in its acknowledgment of almost perpetual ‘trouble’ (mitigated in the 1867 text by the rare treat of the sweet berries), made somehow precious because it is shared with Jesus. The knowledge of that sharing suggests an intimate relationship. To that relationship the slave brought the joys and sorrows of human life (‘Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down’), his wariness about Satan, and his need of prayer (compare ‘It’s me, O lord, standing in the need of prayer’). The word ‘trouble’ can be used as a noun, as here, or as a verb: ‘Come down, angel, trouble the water/ And let my saints go home’ (Taylor, Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies, pp. 207-8). 

William Farley Smith suggested that the ‘I see’ refers to the immediate future rather than past suffering, and that it may be a warning call (Young, 1993, p. 494. This seems too literal a reading. The grammatical looseness of declensions in African American spirituals could easily transpose ‘I see’ into ‘I seen’ (colloquial but understandable); and ‘the troubles I see’ could be in the mind, a looking back as well as a present anxiety. Perhaps the best reading is an indeterminate one, in which the spiritual represents anyone in affliction who trusts in Jesus, and turns to him for comfort. As Young has written, ‘The appeal of the spiritual is its poignant expression of the pain of everyday life experienced in past, present, and future’ (1993, p. 494).

Testimony

Dear husband,
I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for it you do not get me somebody else will. . . . Dear husband, you [know] not the trouble I see . . . . It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hops of the futer are blasted, for there has ben on bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you—for if I thought I shoul never see you this earth would have no charms for me. Do all you can for me, witch I have no doubt you will. Your affectionate wife, Harriet Newby [All spellings are as they appear in the original.] (Cited in Johnson and Smith, p. 420). 

JRW/CY/eileen guenther

Further Reading 

1. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds., Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson, 1867). 
2. Eileen Guenther, In Their Own Words: slave life and the power of spirituals (St Louis: MorningStar Music Publishers, 2016). 
3. Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1998). 
4. Marshall W. Taylor, A Collection of Revival Hymns and Plantation Melodies (Cincinnati: Marshall W. Taylor and W.C. Echols, Publishers, 1883).
5. J.B.T. Marsh, The Story of the Jubilee Singers, including their songs, with supplement by F.J. Loudin (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1898). 
6. John Wesley Work, Folk Song of the American Negro (Nashville, Tennessee: Press of Fisk University, 1907). 
7. Carlton R. Young, Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1993).