The quintessential moment of a jazz funeral is the playing of “Just a Closer Walk to Thee.” Some say this custom goes all the back to early days of the New Orleans music scene nearly a century and half ago. It’s a lovely story… and, well, untrue.
The jazzman most associated with playing this beautiful song — New Orleans’ legendary clarinetist George Lewis — revealed the tune actually has a much more recent history, one in which a barroom jukebox plays a prominent role.
“The first time I played it was in the The Eureka Band” in 1942, Lewis told his biographer Tom Bethell. “We heard it on a music box, and a woman asked us to play it for a funeral” for her murdered husband.
The Murder
The victim in this story, said Lewis, was in an uptown bar in one of New Orleans’ rougher neighborhoods known as “The Battlefield.” He was just putting a nickel in the jukebox when someone stabbed him in the back.
When the widow later learns that the song the poor man wanted to hear on that fateful evening was the new Sister Rosetta Tharpe recording of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” she asked George Lewis’s band to play it at his funeral.
Before that time, Lewis said, the tune was not known in New Orleans; however, after The Eureka Brass Band’s performance, bands have been playing it at funerals ever since.
The Song’s Story
“Just a Closer Walk with Thee” is a surprisingly modern song. It was published in 1940 in Chicago by Kenneth Morris, though Morris never claimed to have actually written the melody.
In his book The Golden Age of Gospel, Horace Clarence Boyer tells how Morris was riding a train from Kansas City to Chicago. Along the way, he stepped off at one of the stops for some fresh air; while there, Morris heard a station porter singing a song.
“He paid little attention at first,” Boyer wrote, “but after he re-boarded the train, the song remained with him. It became so prominent in his mind that at the next stop, he left the train, took another train back to the earlier station and asked the porter to sing the song again.”
Morris wrote down the words and music — later adding a few lyrics of his own to provide more breadth — and published “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” that same year.
Recordings
The first known recording was by the Selah Jubilee Singers for Decca Records on Oct. 8, 1941.
It didn’t take long, though, for the song to get a jazzier treatment. Two months later, also for Decca, Rosetta Tharpe waxed the disc that would wind up on a jukebox in New Orleans and change George Lewis’s life.
After Lewis recorded it on his 1943 New Orleans Stompers album, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” became his most requested tune for the remaining 25 years of his life.
Our Take on the Tune
Recently when Danny Cox read here how The Flood played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” at a friend’s memorial service 20 years ago, he said, “Why don’t we do that song anymore?”
Well, why indeed? So lately the guys have been dusting it off and just listen to the soulful, sassy spin the lads have put on it. Here’s a take from last week’s rehearsal.
More Churchy Stuff, You Say?
If this week’s selection has you in the mood for a little more of The Flood’s brand of reverence, you might enjoy the “Gospel Hour” playlist on the free Radio Floodango music streaming service.
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