Do Lord Remember Me: A Novel

In a gray fieldstone house in Nashville, Tennessee, the Reverend Joshua Smith Sr.--the staunch and gentle man known to thousands in black churches throughout the South as the Singing Evangelist and to one white reporter as "the Colored Billy Graham"--is trying to compose his own obituary on what will be the last day of his life. In doing so, he looks back over that life--from his childhood in rural nothern Mississippi to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, from tears of humiliation to songs of celebration and triumph.

When Do Lord Remember was first published in 1984, the Chicago Sun-Times compared it to Alex Haley's Roots, Newsday described it as "exquisitely crafted," People as "distinguished," the Philadelphia Inquirer as "riveting," and the Cleveland Plain-Dealer declared "every page has something worth remembering." Twenty years later and now a classic, Do Lord Remember Me is an eloquent and deeply moving story about a black family's dignified struggle for survival.