Children, Go Where I Send Thee

Every number in this song is a Bible reference. One is the infant Jesus, two is Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail, three is the Hebrew children in the furnace, and the count keeps climbing from there. The difficulty is that a singer does not simply add the newest number and stop. After each addition the whole list runs back down to one, so by the tenth verse you are reciting ten scriptural tags in reverse order before landing once more on the little bitty baby born in Bethlehem.

That makes it a Christmas song, a counting song, and a feat of memory in one piece of music. Groups usually speed up as they go, which is part of the fun and most of the risk.

Origins

"Children, Go Where I Send Thee" is an African-American cumulative spiritual, and its documented history is shorter than many people assume. The earliest known documentation is a field recording made in 1934 by John and Alan Lomax at Bellwood Camp in Atlanta, Georgia. Bellwood was a prison labour camp, and the singers captured on that recording are an unidentified group of Black prisoners. The Lomaxes recorded widely in Southern prisons during these years, and a substantial part of what survives of early twentieth-century Black folk song was collected in those settings. The earliest known commercial recording followed in 1936.

The song is not found in the nineteenth-century collections of slave songs and spirituals, which is worth stating clearly because it is often assumed to be. There is no composer, no publication date, and no reliable date of composition, so this page carries no year. The 1934 recording documents a song already in circulation; it does not tell us how long it had been circulating.

Its nearest known relative is an English cumulative song called "The Twelve Apostles". Percy Grainger recorded a version in 1908, and Cecil Sharp collected examples in the southern Appalachians between 1908 and 1917. That is a separate song with its own collecting history, and it is sometimes mistakenly presented as the early record of this one. The two share a family resemblance in structure, along with the wider group of counting songs that includes "Green Grow the Rushes, O", but the collecting dates belong to the English song, not to this spiritual.

Meaning & Interpretation

The refrain is call and response. One voice sings "Children, go where I send thee", another answers "How shall I send thee?", and the reply is the count. The singer is being commissioned and sent out, and the numbers are what gets sent: a roll call of scripture carried into the world.

One anchors the whole song to the Nativity, which is why it sits in the Christmas repertoire despite most of its references coming from elsewhere in the Bible. Two for Paul and Silas points to Acts 16, where the pair are imprisoned at Philippi and freed by an earthquake. Three for the Hebrew children means Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who walked out of the furnace unburned in Daniel 3.

Higher numbers vary considerably between versions, and several of them rhyme more than they explain. "Four for the four that stood at the door" and "eight for the eight that stood at the gate" work as sound before they work as doctrine. Ten is usually the Ten Commandments and twelve the twelve apostles. Different congregations and different recordings fill the middle differently, which is normal for a song that travelled by ear rather than by print.

How does the counting in Children, Go Where I Send Thee work?

Each verse introduces one new number, then recites every number below it in descending order before ending on "one for the little bitty baby, born in Bethlehem". Verse three covers three, two, one. Verse seven covers seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. The verses get longer every time while the tune stays the same, so the challenge is holding the full descending list in your head as the tempo rises.

What do the numbers in Children, Go Where I Send Thee stand for?

They stand for people and events from the Bible. One is the infant Jesus at Bethlehem, two is Paul and Silas from Acts 16, three is the Hebrew children of Daniel 3, ten is generally the Ten Commandments, and twelve is generally the twelve apostles. The numbers in between are less fixed and change from version to version, with many chosen for rhyme as much as reference.

Is Children, Go Where I Send Thee a Christmas carol?

It is sung as one, because the count always resolves to the baby born in Bethlehem. Its origins are as a spiritual rather than as a carol written for the Christmas season, and the bulk of its references are drawn from across the Bible rather than from the Nativity story. Choirs and school groups programme it in December, and it appears on a great many Christmas albums.

Where was Children, Go Where I Send Thee first recorded?

At Bellwood Camp, a prison labour camp in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1934, by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. The performers were an unidentified group of Black prisoners. That field recording is the earliest known documentation of the song, and a commercial recording appeared two years later in 1936.