Just a little talk with Jesus

based on
A little talk with Jesus makes it right

including
My Savior died to open wide

The gospel song “Just a little talk with Jesus makes it right,” as written by Cleavant Derricks (1910–1977), is most likely based on one or two precursors, the first a gospel/campmeeting hymn, the second a spiritual, both of unknown origins.

I. Precursor No. 1

The earliest known publication of a song resembling Derricks’ gospel song was in Our Praise in Song (Philadelphia: John J. Hood, 1893 | Fig. 1), edited by John R. Sweney, William J. Kirkpatrick, and H.L. Gilmour. Sweney and Kirkpatrick were active as songbook compilers, and they participated in some of the larger campmeeting circuits of the late nineteenth century. In this collection, they had collected a song marked “Anon,” and “Arranged for this work.” The text began “Tho’ dark the night and clouds look black and stormy overhead,” with two other stanzas and a refrain beginning “A little talk with Jesus makes it right, all right.”

The following year, in another collection compiled by the same editors and publisher, Songs of Love and Praise (1894 | Fig. 2), the text of Fig. 1 appeared in the back of the book, but the music was set to a new text by another campmeeting regular, Eliza Hewitt, beginning “My Savior died to open wide the gates of life to me,” with a refrain, “The blood of Jesus cleanseth white as snow.” Hewitt’s hymn also appeared in The Finest of the Wheat No. 2 (Chicago: R.R. McCabe & Co., 1894), edited by Sweney, Kirkpatrick, and others, with the musical arrangement more clearly credited to Kirkpatrick (thus the arrangement in Fig. 1 is also by Kirkpatrick).

Also in 1894, a different arrangement of the song appeared in Best Hymns (Chicago: Evangelical Publishing Co., 1894 | Fig. 3), edited by Elisha A. Hoffman, with a musical arrangement by Ira O. Hoffman. In this version, the three stanzas are substantially the same as the Kirkpatrick arrangement; the melody contains a few small differences, but the biggest change was in the expansion of the text of the chorus:

A little talk with Jesus makes my heart more light;
A little talk with Jesus makes the path more bright;
In trials of every kind, praise God I always find
A little talk with Jesus makes it right, all right.

Finally, yet another variant appeared in 1894, this one including an additional first stanza, “While fighting for my Savior here,” in Tears and Triumphs (Columbia, SC: L.L. Pickett, 1894 | Fig. 4). Musically, the arrangement is nearly identical to the one by William Kirkpatrick in Fig. 1 above. Aside from the new first stanza, the rest of the text is almost the same as the Sweney/Kirkpatrick edition, with some differences in the third stanza.

Both the three-stanza version as in Sweney/Kirkpatrick (Fig. 1) and the four-stanza version as in Pickett (Fig. 4) continued to be reprinted in hymnals and gospel songbooks into the mid twentieth century. Hewitt’s contrafacta text (Fig. 2) was printed a handful of times over the next decade but fell out of use. Hoffman’s rewording of the chorus (Fig. 3) also fell out of use.

II. Precursors Nos. 2 & 3

In 1902, John W. Work II (1871–1925) of Fisk University published a new collection of spirituals, New Jubilee Songs (Nashville: Fisk University, 1902 | Fig. 5), including the song “A little talk with Jesus.” In this case, the refrain appears to be a simpler version of the gospel refrain, minus the melodic chromaticism, with a greater emphasis on notes within the tonic triad (F–A–C) rather than the more continual movement of the gospel melody. The text of the stanzas is completely different, with the only similarities to the gospel version being the thematic idea of storms in stanza 2, the mention of victory in stanza 3, and the internal rhyme in the penultimate phrase (“But Jesus is our friend / He’ll keep us to the end”).

Another variant of the refrain appeared in the first numbered edition of Folk Songs of the American Negro (Nashville: Work Bros., 1907 | Fig. 6). In this case, the variable part of the text, a simple substitution of words per stanza, is very brief, and the text of the refrain is much simpler. The repetition of “All right” is a notable feature.

Both of these spirituals were reprinted in American Negro Songs and Spirituals (NY: Bonanza Books, 1940 | Fig. 6), pp. 78-79, edited by John W. Work III (1901–1967).

Although the Fisk versions of the song were printed starting in 1902, one version (probably Fig. 5) had been part of the repertoire of the Fisk Jubilee Singers as early as 1900. On one surviving concert program from 24 April 1900, at the Congregational Church of South Royalton, Vermont, the song “Little Talk with Jesus Makes it Right” was featured among fifteen songs (Fig. 7). The director of the group at the time was John W. Work II. The document is older than the pasted-on date; among the various personal statements, the last is dated 1 Dec. 1899, so the actual printed date is sometime after, probably December 1899 or January 1900.

Fig. 7. “Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville, Tenn.” Middle Tennessee State University, Center for Popular Music; Posters, Playbills & Programs Collection.

With the gospel version appearing anonymously as early as 1893 and the spiritual as early as 1900, it seems as though both emerged from similar processes, passed down through gatherings and campmeetings, probably from a common but diverging origin, by an unnamed writer who launched a successful tradition but remains a mystery. The song was transformed again in 1937 by a man who is more readily known.

III. Cleavant Derricks

Rev. Cleavant Derricks was born 13 May 1910 in East Chattanooga, Tennessee, son of John T. Derricks and Ora (Kinamore) Derricks. Derricks developed an early aptitude for music, initially taking lessons at the Cadek Conservatory of Music, a school started by prominent Chattanooga violinist Joseph Cadek (1868–1927). Derricks also had two years of college at the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville.

As a young songwriter, Derricks developed a relationship with the Stamps-Baxter office in Chattanooga, run by co-owner J.R. Baxter Jr. (1887–1960). Baxter launched the Stamps-Baxter company with Virgil Stamps (1892–1940) in 1926 and ran part of the operation in Chattanooga until Stamps’ death in 1940, when the Baxters moved to Dallas to run operations from the main office there. Baxter thought highly enough of Derricks’ songwriting ability that he published a collection of Derricks’ songs in 1934 as Pearls of Paradise, including one of his most successful songs, “We’ll soon be done with troubles and trials.”

Stamps-Baxter published his gospel song “Just a little talk with Jesus” in Harbor Bells No. 6 (Dallas: Stamps-Baxter, 1937 | Fig. 8). This original version had three stanzas and a refrain. Curiously, it was labeled “Spiritual” while being credited clearly to Derricks. He sold the song to Stamps-Baxter in exchange for fifty songbooks, which he then sold for ten cents each.[1]

Having grown up in Tennessee near the Fisk Jubilee Singers, it seems likely Derricks had heard renditions of the old spiritual, and the influence is clear, but Derricks made it his own composition. In the stanzas, the melodic formula is very similar, set up in eight bars with a half-cadence in the middle, with the shape of the melody being fairly static, sticking closely to prominent harmonic tones. The Fisk melody and Derricks’ melody can be sung to the same underlying chord progression. Textually, Derricks’ stanzas were new, but they followed a similar thematic pattern as the spiritual, opening with a stanza about being lost in sin, followed by a metaphorical stanza about clouds and mists (compared to lightning and thunder in the spiritual), and concluding with a stanza about appealing to Jesus in difficult circumstances. Like both the gospel hymn and the spiritual, the penultimate phrase of every stanza contains internal rhyme (“It bathed my heart in love and wrote my name above”). In contrast to the spiritual and gospel hymn, the ends of Derricks’ stanzas are slightly different each time.

Derricks’ real advancement is in the refrain, where he crafted something significantly different from the spiritual, leaning toward a standard blues pattern, each line introduced by a bass pickup. The text draws from the main idea of the spiritual, “A little talk with Jesus makes it right,” and it carries over the spiritual’s “troubles of every kind”—here rendered as “tell him all about our troubles”—but Derricks built on these ideas to create a more robust lyric.

Hymn scholar C. Michael Hawn noted the presence of the phrase “feel a little prayer wheel turning” and its interesting roots:

A prayer wheel is a cylindrical container, perhaps made of wood, metal, or some other substance. Inside are inscribed the words of a prayer; or prayers may be written on a piece of paper and placed inside. Prayer wheels are commonly used in Tibetan Buddhism, and practitioners believe that as the prayer wheel is turned or spun around, each rotation results in the prayers inside actually being somehow prayed, even if not spoken.[2]

In spite of its Buddhist associations, Hawn believed Derricks encountered the prayer wheel in a Christian context, as they have a history of being used by charismatic and/or Pentecostal Christians, and they were used by some African American worshipers before and after the Civil War. As recently as 2018, this practice was described and promoted in The Prayer Wheel: A Daily Guide to Renewing Your Faith with a Rediscovered Spiritual Practice (NY: Convergent Books, 2018) by Patton Dodd and others (Amazon). The authors traced the Christian version of the practice approximately 900 years back to a medieval manuscript.

Hawn also noted Derricks’ use of advanced poetic techniques, such as internal rhymes (“I once was lost in sin, but Jesus took me in,” etc.), exact rhymes, and his use of smaller words during the rapid sixteenth-note phrases versus longer words on longer notes.

IV. Recorded History

One of the precursors, most likely the spiritual, was recorded by the Pace Jubilee Singers for Victor (23350) on 25 October 1929. This recording does not appear to have been reissued in a digital format. Derricks’ version was first recorded by the Stamps Quartet in Dallas, Texas, on 13 May 1938 as OKeh 04329 (also released as Vocalion 04329, Conqueror 9668, Columbia 37672, 20271). At the time, the quartet probably consisted of Jim Gaither, Walter Rippetoe, R.E. Bacon, and Virgil O. Stamps, with pianist Marion Snider.

The following year, it was recorded by the Rangers Quartet in New York City on 22 September 1939 as Decca 5749. The quartet included Vernon Hyles, Denver Crumpler, Walter Leverett, and Arnold Hyles. This was re-recorded in 1948 as Bullet 106A (Nashville).

The song was recorded by the Four Great Wonders (Amos Sharp, Robert Moss, L.V. Cox, Sollie J. Pugh) on 8 October 1940 in Atlanta for Bluebird Records (B8604). This was reissued by Document Records in 1997 on Church Choirs, Gospel Singers, and Preachers, Volume 2 (DOCD 5589).

Derricks himself did not record the song until late in his life. In 1975, he made a surprise visit to Canaanland Music in Nashville, Tennessee, and asked for the opportunity to publish some new songs and record some of his material. The head of Canaanland, Aaron Brown, learned how Derricks had never properly been paid for his work. In an interview for the Nashville Banner, Brown explained the situation:

For the first time in his life, Rev. became a licensed songwriter. What I’m trying to say is he has virtually never been paid for his songs or their performances. If he had become affiliated with BMI, ASCAP, or SESAC, the three song licensing agencies, he would be a millionaire by now. No doubt about it. Instead, what Rev. did was to sell his songs to the Stamps-Baxter publishing company in Texas. He would sell them for almost nothing. In return the company would furnish him songbooks for his songs. He would sell those to make some money.

It’s disheartening to realize he made $5 for “Just a little talk with Jesus.” I would say every gospel singer and every gospel group in the country has recorded “Just a little talk with Jesus.”[3]

Derricks recorded his most famous song on the ensuing album, Reverend Cleavant Derricks and Family Singing His Own “Just a Little Talk with Jesus” (1975). The following year, he released another album, Satisfaction Guaranteed (1976). Derricks died 14 April 1977 of colon cancer, but his legacy lives on through his music, which still thrives. In 1977, the Oak Ridge Boys, perhaps in tribute to Derricks, recorded “Just a little talk with Jesus” on the album Live (Rockland Road, 1977); this recording of the song earned them a Grammy award in 1978 for Best Traditional Gospel Performance. The song has been recorded by many other notable artists, and it is still included in hymnals and songbooks.

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
5 February 2020
rev. 22 February 2022

Footnotes:

1. “Aging gospel writer accepts fameless fate in music field,” Lincoln Journal (Lincoln, NE: 13 Jan. 1976), p. 2.

2. C. Michael Hawn, “Just a little talk with Jesus,” History of Hymns, Discipleship Ministries, United Methodist Church (15 August 2011): https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/just-a-little-talk-with-jesus

3. Bill Hance, “Rev. Derricks finds new heaven on earth,” Nashville Banner (2 Dec. 1975).

Related Resources:

Bill Hance, “Rev. Derricks finds new heaven on earth,” Nashville Banner (2 Dec. 1975).

“Aging gospel writer accepts fameless fate in music field,” Lincoln Journal (Lincoln, NE: 13 Jan. 1976), p. 2.

Eileen Southern & Josephine Wright, American Traditions in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s–1920: An Annotated Bibliography (NY: Greenwood Press, 1990).

Robert M.W. Dixon et al., Blues & Gospel Records 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 1997).

Church Choirs, Gospel Singers and Preachers, Volume 2, 1925-1955 (Document Records, DOCD 5589, 1997): Amazon

Charles K. Wolfe, “Cleavant Derricks,” Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music (NY: Routledge, 2005): p. 100.

Tony Russell, Country Music Records: A Discography, 1921–1942 (Oxford: University Press, 2004).

Ivan M. Tribe, “J.R. Baxter Jr.,” Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music (NY: Routledge, 2005): p. 32.

Greg Freeman, “The Legacy of Reverend Cleavant Derricks,” Southern Edition (12 March 2011):
http://www.southernedition.com/RevCleavantDerricks.html

C. Michael Hawn, “Just a little talk with Jesus,” History of Hymns, Discipleship Ministries, United Methodist Church (15 August 2011): https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/just-a-little-talk-with-jesus