“Ain’t No Grave,” often titled “Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down,” is a gospel song attributed to Brother Claude Ely, a Pentecostal preacher and singer from the Virginia coalfields. By his own account, Ely composed it as a boy in the 1930s while gravely ill with tuberculosis, singing it as his family prayed over him.
The song was recorded before Ely ever set it down himself: the gospel singer Bozie Sturdivant cut a version in 1942, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe recorded it later in the decade. Ely made his own recording in the early 1950s. Its triumphant promise of resurrection, that no grave can hold the believer’s body, has kept it alive across gospel, country, and folk traditions, and it later figured in the film Cool Hand Luke.
The string band Crooked Still brought “Ain’t No Grave” to a younger acoustic audience on their 2006 album Shaken by a Low Sound, pairing the old gospel text with banjo, cello, and fiddle. The song remains a powerful set piece for bluegrass and old-time performers.
