Yes, God is Real

I. Origins

This gospel hymn by Kenneth Morris (1917–1989) was written early in his career in his publishing partnership with singer Sallie Martin (1895–1988). Morris later recalled how he had not initially expected the publishing venture to be lucrative, so he was supporting himself by giving lessons, but the business exploded through his involvement in the National Baptist Convention:

We were Baptists. The songs that we sang and most of the churches we went to were through our connection with the Baptists. The Baptists were really the ones who pushed this music—at that particular time, it was. If you didn’t go to the National Baptist Convention, you could just forget it. There were different singers to come up at different times to sing their songs. Professor [E.W.D.] Isaac and Lucie Campbell were in charge of the music there at the Convention. . . .

When I started out here, the name was Martin and Morris Music Studio Teaching School. I had to make a living. I gave lessons. We were not looking forward to the sale of music to make a living. “Just a closer walk with thee” [performed at the Convention] in 1944 put us on the map. Right behind that, for four or five years straight, I had hits at the Convention. “Jesus, I love you,” “Just a closer walk with thee,” “Yes, God is real,” “Christ is all,” and “Don’t you care”—five in a row. That is what put us on the map, on what I would call the big time.[1]

Morris’s most enduring song from that time period—besides “Just a closer walk with thee,” which he arranged but did not write—is “Yes, God is real.” Morris offered the story behind the inspiration of the hymn in an undated booklet, Twelve Gospel Song “Hits” and Their Stories (Chicago: Martin & Morris Music Studio, n.d.):

I read two articles in a magazine written by two men. One was by an atheist, who didn't believe in God, and the other was by a clergyman. The atheist, in his article, gave his reasons for his non-belief in God, likewise the clergyman gave his reasons for his belief in God. After reading both articles, the question stared me in the face, “Why did I believe in God?” In the face of the scientific evidence brought forth by the atheist, my belief in God seemed futile. Even though the clergyman had given some excellent reasons for belief in God, they were by no means conclusive or satisfactory to me.

I pondered over this dilemma for some time before I got my answer. Something within spoke to me clearly one day and said, “Yes God is real, for He lives within your soul.” I was satisfied, for that is really the only test for any individual; thus I sat down and wrote the words and music for this song, for I had at last found within myself the answer to this all-important question.[2]

The song was first printed on single sheets in 1944, in three stanzas with a refrain, written as an accompanied melody (Fig. 1).

That same year, the song appeared in the President Jemison Special Song Book No. 1 of 1944 (Chicago: T.R. Frye, 1944). Dr. D.V. Jemison was president of the National Baptist Convention USA at the time.

In many mid-to-late twentieth century songbooks, the title and/or refrain were altered to read “My God is real,” but modern hymnals have generally reverted to the original. The hymn has had a lasting presence in National Baptist hymnals, starting with the New National Baptist Hymnal (1977), and in other hymnals designed specifically with African American congregations in mind.

The earliest known recording was by the Sunlight Jubilee Singers (Joseph L. Scott, Wiley Bradford, William M. Henry, Cleveland Lee Wilcox, and Milton Castille) of Alameda, California, in 1946 as Down Town 2014. “Yes, God is real” was recorded by James Earle Hines and His Goodwill Singers (Los Angeles) on a Gotham Records (G-650-A) release in 1948, the same year Sallie Martin moved to Los Angeles to establish a west coast outlet for Martin & Morris. Other notable covers include Mahalia Jackson (1958) and Johnny Cash (1962).

II. Analysis

Gospel music scholar Horace Boyer, writing in 1992, spoke of the song’s legacy:

African American church congregations know this song so well that they need neither the score nor the text to sing it. It opens with a declaration of the inability of the mortal person to understand the universe and to survey all of its wonders:

There are some things I may not know
There are some places I can’t go.

However, it quickly shifts to a statement of confidence proclaiming that which the person can understand and his or her joy in such knowledge:

But I am sure of this one thing:
That God is real, for I can feel Him deep within.

According to Morris, “Yes, God is real” was his most commercially successful composition. It has been translated into twenty-four languages and is sung all over the world.[3]

The second stanza seems to echo the sentiments of Joshua 24:15 (“as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”). Overall, the hymn describes an experiential faith. The refrain speaks of being washed and made whole, ideas found in passages such as Revelation 1:5 (“Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood”) and Matthew 9:22 (“Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole,” KJV).

Musically, the original printed score had only a basic chord structure, rather than a transcription of how Morris intended it to be played. According to Morris, this was by design:

I would have to write the music in easy keys, not too many florid passages, and within the ability of a pianist of not over a third-grade level. A lot of runs, a lot of sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes, I had to cut them down. You would have to change the time values and a lot of different chords that they are looking for and want now. We couldn’t use them then. It was too foreign for their ears and they couldn’t play them anyway. If I wanted them in there, naturally, when I played, I could always add and interpolate. So the sheet music was a basic structure. . . .

When you reduce yourself to playing cold notes, it sounds just like I said, cold. . . . So you are only repeating what someone else has done, basically, but you don’t get the gospel feel because gospel, soul, is what we are talking about, is what you put into it and not into the notes. I can play . . . the same song twenty times and never repeat myself, or twenty times I’ll play it in a different way because I feel differently twenty times. That’s soul. That’s gospel.[4]

by CHRIS FENNER
for Hymnology Archive
31 January 2020
rev. 11 February 2022

Footnotes:

1. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Kenneth Morris: I’ll Be a Servant for the Lord,” We’ll Understand It Better By and By (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992), pp. 332–333.

2. Kenneth Morris, Twelve Gospel Song “Hits” and Their Stories (Chicago: Martin & Morris Music Studio, n.d.), pp. 14–15.

3. Horace Clarence Boyer, “Kenneth Morris: Composer and Dean of Black Gospel Music Publishers,” We’ll Understand It Better By and By (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1992), pp. 318–323.

4. Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Kenneth Morris,” We’ll Understand It Better By and By (1992), pp. 339–340.

Related Resources:

Robert L. Anderson, “There are some things I may not know,” New Century Hymnal Companion (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998), p. 414.

Robert Marovich, “Kenneth Morris,” Encyclopedia of American Gospel Music (NY: Routledge, 2005), pp. 264–265.

Cedric J. Hayes & Robert Laughton, Gospel Discography 1943–2000, 2 vols. (Canada: Eyeball Productions, 2014).