One of the oarsmen, a brisk young fellow, not a soldier, on being asked for his theory of the matter, dropped out a coy confession. On this point I could get no information, though I asked many questions, until at last, one day when I was being rowed across from Beaufort to Ladies' Island, I found myself, with delight, on the actual trail of a song. And I always wondered, about these, whether they had always a conscious and definite origin in some leading mind, or whether they grew by gradual accretion, in an almost unconscious way.
Says of the Scots Songs, that, no matter who made them, they were soon attributed to the minister of the parish whence they sprang.
This was number 35 in 's collection of Negro Spirituals that appeared in the of June 1867, with a comment by Higginson reflecting on how such songs were composed (i.e., whether the work of a single author or through what used to be called 'communal composition'): Even of this last composition, however, we have only the approximate date and know nothing of the mode of composition. The tune has been changed so that it now echoes the opening and closing melody of ' No More Auction Block For Me', also known from its refrain as 'Many Thousands Gone'. Tindley's 'I'll Overcome Some Day' was believed to have influenced the structure for 'We Shall Overcome', with both the text and the melody having undergone a process of alteration. 'Even today,' wrote musicologist Horace Boyer in 1983, 'ministers quote his texts in the midst of their sermons as if they were poems, as indeed they are.' A letter printed on the front page of the February 1909, United Mine Workers Journal states: 'Last year at a strike, we opened every meeting with a prayer, and singing that good old song, 'We Will Overcome'.' This statement implied that the song was well-known, and it was also the first acknowledgement of such a song having been sung in both a secular context and a mixed-race setting. Tindley's importance, however, was primarily as a lyricist and poet whose words spoke directly to the feelings of his audiences, many of whom had been freed from only 36 years before he first published his songs, and were often impoverished, illiterate, and newly arrived in the North. Tindley's songs were written in an idiom rooted in, using pentatonic intervals, with ample space allowed for improvised interpolation, the addition of 'blue' thirds and sevenths, and frequently featuring short refrains in which the congregation could join. The world is one great battlefield, With forces all arrayed If in my heart I do not yield, I'll overcome some day.
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