Ain’t Got Long to Stay Heah

“Ain’t Got Long to Stay Heah” is a spiritual arrangement for voice and piano by Eva Jessye. The song is the seventh arrangement included in Jessye’s book My Spirituals (1927). In the song’s preface, Jessye describes how each fall, many families from her town would travel by wagon from Kansas to the cotton fields in Indian Territory, in order to pick cotton to provide for the coming winter. Each day, there was a competition between the native Territorians and the visiting Kansans about who would pick more cotton, with large wagers laid on both sides. Jessye writes, “Each group had its own song leader, whose business it was to keep a tune going to lighten the toil and thus speed up the cotton picking. The native leader, a strapping boy of nineteen summers, inspired his contingents with ‘Goin’ To Pick Dis Cotton ‘Tell De Sun Go Down,’ while the visitors, led by a short fat woman ironically called ‘Tiny,’ replied with the pointed plaint: ‘Ain’t Got Long to Stay Heah.’”