Paul Van Ness on Instagram: "This beautiful African-American spiritual is sung all over the world, in many denominations, often accompanying communion services. Historians believe that the spiritual originated in coastal South Carolina among the West African Gullah/Geechee culture there. About its origins, author Miles Mark Fisher wrote this in Negro Slave Songs in the United States (1953): "[Originally the hymn] relates hardly at all to holy communion, which does not necessarily require early m