Nobody Knows the Trouble I See

Another well-known song in the same vein of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, Nobody Knows the Trouble I See is based on an African American spiritual called “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”. The song has varying titles including “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” (similar to Ruth Starr Rose’s title) and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had.” The song carries a sorrowful tune, lamenting the troubles the singer has gone through, while praising God and Jesus for being there for them.

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” was among the songs performed by the Hampton Students on their tour around the nation in order to raise funds to build Virginia Hall. The song is recorded in an 1874 book titled Hampton and Its Students by two Hampton teachers, Mary Frances Armstrong and Helen Wilhelmina Ludlow, along with 49 other “Cabin and Plantation Songs.” Reverend Theodore L. Cuyler attended a concert by the Hampton Students at his Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, New York in April of 1873. He wrote about it in the New Jersey Evangelist, mentioning that among the songs the Hampton Students performed, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” was one.

In his article praising the Hampton Students’ performance in front of an audience that was “hushed to silence and melted to tears under the music of nature,” Reverend Cuyler argues that African American spirituals are the only real national music of the United States. He wrote, “Import as much of Italian and German as we may, the negro music is our only real national music. It was born on the soil. It is interwoven with our national history, and especially with our grandest historical epic, the late war of Freedom. No music rouses and melts an audience like these plantation melodies, sung by the rich negro voices.”