Well, it’s complicated.
“Great Day” is a spiritual, meaning that it falls into the category of true folk music, a genre that starts out with oral traditions and only later involves writing the words down. By the time a true folk song is committed to paper it almost always has multiple versions. And why do I keep using the word “true”? Because there are many songs written “in the style of” a folk song that aren’t truly so since they have a known, single author. In the case of this version of the piece (which my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, will be performing in March 20241) there is an arranger, Warren Martin, but no composer or lyricist, so we seem to be in the “true folk” category. In my signature bopping around the Internet looking for clues I’ve found a number of sites that have published the lyrics, but there are none that try to unpack the layers of meaning contained in them. So I’m venturing out on my own here. If you’d like to read a general discussion of spirituals and their origins, I’d recommend that you read an earlier post on this website, “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”