This is perhaps the most universally used spiritual in all the hymnals of Cristendom. With a variant form of the first phrase, it first appeared in print in Old Plantation Hymns, compiled by William E. Barton in 1899. Frederick J. Work printed it with this traditional music in Folk Songs of the American Negro,1907. 

The primary poetic analogy is that all of us were there at Calvary, by virtue of the fact that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom.3:23). 

The secondary analogy is in His suffering, especially for the slaves. The death of Jesus took on a deep and personal poignancy. It was not merely the death of a man or God, but there was a quality of identification in it that continued to burn its way deep into the heart of even the most unemotional. The suffering of Jesus on the cross was something more; He suffered, He died, but not alone, because in imagery they, the slaves, were with Him throughout all the phases of that agonizing death. They knew something of what He suffered. It was a cry of the heart that found an echo and response in their own woes. 

Sometimes another stanza is added, “Were you there when He rose up from the grave?” The melody, except for the A-flat in the last line, is predictably in the pentatonic mode.