Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2014-01-08

EARLIEST PRINTED OR RECORDED REFERENCE: 
Recording: Dixie Jubilee Singers, May 30/June 1924. 
Print: Clarence Cameron White, 1927, Forty Negro Spirituals, Theodore Presser Co. Philadelphia.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES: This old spiritual was first introduced in Albany (Georgia) by Reverend Ralph Abernathy during the summer of 1962 when mass arrests and demonstrations erupted for the second time. He taught it one night to a mass meeting of the Negro community at Mount Zion Baptist Church. It immediately caught on and became widely used in the demonstrations. (Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement through its songs, edited and compiled by Guy and Candie Carawan)

Before Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around was used in the Civil Rights conflict, the song was a spiritual called Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Around and printed with music in Clarence Cameron White’s 1927, Forty Negro Spirituals, Theodore Presser Co. Philadelphia. 

Here are the lyrics from Clarence Cameron White:

Don’t you let nobody turn you aroun’,-
turn you aroun’, turn you aroun’!
Don’t you let nobody turn you aroun’!
Keep on to Calvary.

Don’t you let that sinner turn you aroun’,
turn you aroun’, turn you aroun’,
Don’t you let that sinner turn you aroun’,
Keep on to Calvary.