“Ain’t No Grave,” also called “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” is attributed to Brother Claude Ely, a Holiness Pentecostal preacher from Virginia. According to family and oral-history tradition preserved by his great-nephew Macel Ely, he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis as a boy, around 1934, when he was about twelve; with his family praying around him, he began to sing the song. King Records helped him copyright it in 1953, and King issued it as King 45-1311 in February 1954, backed with “Talk About Jesus,” billing him as “The Gospel Ranger.”
The song had a life in Black gospel before Ely’s record. Bozie Sturdivant recorded a slower, gospel version in July 1942, released in 1943 as “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down,” and Sister Rosetta Tharpe recorded it in 1946–47, with barrelhouse piano. The Two Gospel Keys cut an uptempo version in April 1947.
The lyric is a series of visions of the resurrection. The refrain says that no grave will hold the singer’s body down: when he hears the trumpet sound he will get up out of the ground. Gabriel is told not to blow his trumpet until he hears from the singer; the singer looks over yonder and sees a band of angels coming for him, and people dressed in white by the river. He goes down to the river Jordan, buries his knees in the sand and hollers “Hosanna” until he reaches the promised land, and asks King Jesus to meet him in the middle of the air. Some recorded versions share those last lines about wings with the traditional song “In My Time of Dying.”
The Upchurch Brothers released it on an Ark EP in 1962, according to Bluegrass Discography. Harry Dean Stanton sang it in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, while Paul Newman’s character digs a grave. Tim and Mollie O’Brien recorded it in Westminster, Colorado, in November 1993 with Mike Seeger on banjo, for Away Out on the Mountain (Sugar Hill, 1994). Crooked Still’s version, on Shaken by a Low Sound (Signature Sounds, 2006), has Aoife O’Donovan and Rushad Eggleston singing, with Gregory Liszt on banjo, Eggleston on cello and Corey DiMario on bass; it later appeared in the 2020 video game The Last of Us Part II. Johnny Cash recorded it shortly before his death in 2003, and it was released in 2010 as the title track of American VI: Ain’t No Grave. The Wilson Banjo Co. recorded it on Spirits in the Hills (Bonfire, 2017), and Wikipedia reports that it reached number one on the bluegrass gospel charts several times in 2018.
