“On the Jericho Road” is a gospel song written in the late 1920s by Don McCrossan, a Los Angeles evangelist and gospel composer. It was published by the Stamps-Baxter company a few years later and spread quickly through Southern gospel singing.
The song’s imagery draws on the New Testament — the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the setting of the parable of the Good Samaritan — and turns it into a metaphor for the journey of life, on which, the lyric promises, there is room for just two, the traveler and Jesus. That warm, companionable message made it a gospel-quartet favorite.
The song was recorded widely across gospel and country and crossed readily into bluegrass.
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