Summary: This is a personal essay inspired by several gospel and bluegrass songs. At the end of the post, there are links to all songs mentioned in the essay, as well as a few covers.
When I was a middle school kid in the 90s, we had several, shall we say, “community organizations” in my area of town. Boys as young as 12 transitioned from being kids I played with to members of one of these organizations. Goofy teenagers who used to knock on our doors then splash us with buckets of water when we answered – they called it “dashing” – became serious and less accessible. Once they had joined an organization, it never took long for the boys to change from someone I knew to someone who I wasn’t sure I knew anymore. It usually happened overnight.
It made me miss being lightly bullied with summer pranks.
Off the top of my head I’d say I knew two or three dozen of those boys, and they knew me. One of them was my big cousin, who never stopped being a goofball with his family, even as he got into serious levels of trouble to prove himself in his organization. Until the day he died in his early 40s, having spent half his life in prison, my cousin could laugh in almost any situation.
When my cousin joined an “organization” it was for obvious reasons. He’d grown up witnessing domestic violence and alcoholism, he was a special education student, and he was so tall that his mom couldn’t find pants to fit him. Even when his pants were sagging they were too short, and he was probably teased about it. My household was dirt poor but his was even poorer. They slept over sometimes when their utilities were disconnected for nonpayment, or we’d fill the same buckets he’d used to dash us and carry water to their house (on foot) so they could bathe and flush the commode. By 13 he was the man in a family of kids growing up without fathers in the house.
When he first joined the organization, sometimes he and his friends would hide under our house at night, presumably hiding from the police. We lived in a dilapidated old house that used to be a well-off person’s fancy house. It was built shortly after the Civil War. The house sat high enough off the ground that you could crawl under it and roll over comfortably.
Now, my mother had a revolver and she was not afraid to use it. Everybody in the neighborhood, including the most high-ranking youth in the organization, knew not to mess with my mother. This was, of course, because she had pulled the gun on all of them. But my cousin knew that if he and his friends hid under the kids’ bedrooms, we would make sure my mother didn’t hear about it.
Sometimes we’d hear them giggling under the house, or they’d knock on the floor so we knew it was them. Other times I’d only learn about it the next day, when they asked if we’d heard them.
I used to wonder what made the difference between the night and the day. Why did they need to hide at night if they could walk around freely the next day without being apprehended?
Eventually I figured out that the darkness had been his cloak. But in this life, the darkness we go through doesn’t truly feel safe until you know the dawn is coming.
I first encountered the phrase, “the darkest hour is just before dawn,” as the preface to a Dean Koontz paperback, and while I don’t recall which book it was, I have held on to that saying for decades. Apparently it’s an old Irish idiom, first put to print in 1650 by English preacher Thomas Fuller. A similar sentiment is found in the thirtieth Psalm, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” (Psalm 30:5) Romans 13:12 is about being a disciple of Jesus but is rooted in the same theme: "The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Therefore let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.”
There are quite a few songs based on this old saying. My favorite is The Darkest Hour by the Clark Sisters. It’s from their “glittery gospel” era, when disco and funk were the rage in secular music and they (controversially) bled over into contemporary gospel. If you had a television in the 90s and you ever saw a gospel music infomercial, then you're at least familiar with one or two lines of this song.
There is also a country and bluegrass standard, The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn, written by Ralph Stanley and covered by EmmyLou Harris, among others.
Stanley sings,
“The sun is slowly sinkin’
The day is almost gone
Still darkness falls around us
And we must journey on
The darkest hour is just before dawn
The narrow way leads home
Lay down your soul at Jesus’ feet
The darkest hour is just before dawn.”
Every human that’s ever lived or will ever live will go through a moment of darkness. We may go through many. Life is full of dark people, dark events, and dark chapters. But 2 Samuel 22:29 says, “The Lord shall enlighten my darkness.” He does, and He has, and He will.
No matter what you go through, never forget that, as Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote, “it cannot always be night.” And even when you are in the darkest hour, even if you are in the darkness so long that you could build a house in it, and you felt so low that you just crawled under it, remember that the day is still coming. Journey on.
Last updated: April 5, 2025
YouTube Links:
The Clark Sisters (1988)
EmmyLou Harris (1980)
Spotify Links
Willie Banks and the Messengers (Their cover is not on Spotify; this links to main artist page. Check out their song “God is Still in Charge” to get started on their discography.)