“Standing in the Need of Prayer,” also sung as “It’s Me, It’s Me, O Lord,” is an African American spiritual with no known author; SecondHandSongs files it as traditional. A hymn-history article for the United Methodist Church names National Jubilee Melodies (1916) as the first book to print the text, under the title “Standing in Need of Prayer,” followed by Golden Bells (1923), Songs of the Cross (1924) and Seth Parker’s Hymnal (1930).
The verses are a string of denials, each answered by the same line. It is not the father or the mother, the preacher or the deacon, the brother or the sister who needs prayer, the singer says — and in some versions not the thief or the liar either — it is me. The hymn-history article reads it as a spiritual about the personal nature of prayer, in which the singer, having prayed for everyone else, makes his own petition.
Bluegrass bands have taken it up as a quartet number. SecondHandSongs lists versions by the Johnson Mountain Boys, Hot Rize, the Country Gentlemen and the Lewis Family with Carl Story, among many others, from gospel quartets to the King’s Singers.
