We shall walk through the valley in peace

We shall walk through the valley in peace. African American spiritual*.  Variations of this song run deeply in African American tradition. The earliest print version appears in the post-Civil War collection Slave Songs of the United States* (Boston, 1867, no. 95), the first collection of American folk music. Many of the songs gathered by the originators for this source were notated from the formerly enslaved soldiers under the command of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson* (1823–1911), a Unitarian abolitionist from Massachusetts. He commanded the first black regiment, the First South Carolina Volunteers, mainly from men who lived on the islands off the coast of South Carolina, an area...