So I Can Write My Name

“So I Can Write my Name” is a spiritual arrangement for voice and piano by Eva Jessye. The song is the twelfth arrangement included in Jessye’s book My Spirituals (1927). In the song’s preface, Jessye writes that she learned it from “Happy Day”—a young man known for his “buoyant spirits” and “ready tongue.” Happy Day himself learned the tune from his maternal grandmother, “Gran’ma Spikes,” who would shout it while “loitering about her tiny garden, spreading pumpkin seed to dry, or crooning to one of the youngsters, who in search of sugar cookies, hung around the door step.”