The song came to the brothers out of the church world of their southwest Virginia home. Ralph Stanley recalled learning it from a Free Will Baptist preacher, and Carter Stanley introduced it on stage as an old camp-meeting tune — one of the sparely backed sacred songs rooted in the Primitive Baptist and revival singing of the mountains. Its text draws on the biblical patriarch Jacob’s dream of a ladder reaching to heaven.

Though the Stanley Brothers rarely performed it in public, Ralph Stanley returned to it often in his later solo career.