Spirituals

Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, Many new

Terminology#

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—one of the largest reference works on music and musicians —itemized and described “spiritual” in its electronic resource, Grove Music Online, an important part of Oxford Music Online, as a “type of sacred song created by and for African Americans that originated in oral tradition. Although its exact provenance is unknown, spirituals were identifiable as a genre by the early 19th century.” The term was generally employed without the descriptor “African American”. “Negro spirituals” is a 19th-century term that according to writer Arthur Evans was “used for songs with religious texts created by African Enslaved in America”. The first published book of slave songs referred to them as “spirituals”. In the introductory phrase, the singular form is used without the adjective “African American.” Throughout the encyclopedia entry, the singular and plural forms of the term are used without the “African American” descriptor. The Library’s introductory sentence observes that “A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s. The African American spiritual (also called the Negro Spiritual) constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folksong.”

Context#

The transatlantic slave trade is described by a United Nations report as the largest forced migration in recorded human history. As a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade, the greatest movement of Africans was to the Americas—with 96 percent of the captives from the African coasts arriving on cramped slave ships at ports in South America and the Caribbean Islands. From 1501 to 1830, four Africans crossed the Atlantic for every one European, making the demographics of the Americas in that era more of an extension of the African diaspora than a European one. The legacy of this migration is evident today, with large populations of people of African descent living throughout the Americas. From 1501 through 1867, approximately “12.5 million Africans” from “almost every country with an Atlantic coastline” were kidnapped and coerced into slavery, according to the 2015 Atlas based on about 35,000 slaving voyages. Roughly 6% of all enslaved Africans transported via the trans-Atlantic slave trade arrived in the United States, both before and after the colonial era; the remainder went to Brazil, the West Indies or other regions. The majority of these Africans came from the West African slave coast. The Portuguese Empire transported the first African enslaved peoples to the New World in the 1560s, and until the 1700s Mexico was the primary destination for those captives under Spanish control. The first African enslaved people in what is now the United States arrived in 1526, making landfall in present-day Winyah Bay, South Carolina in a short-lived colony called San Miguel de Gualdape under control of the Spanish Empire. They were also the first enslaved Africans in North Americas to stage a slave rebellion. In 1619, the first slave ship had carried twenty people from the west central African kingdom of Kongo—to a life of enslavement in what is now Mexico. The Kingdom of Kongo, at that time stretched over an area of 60,000 mi km in the watershed of the Congo River—the second longest river in Africa—and had a population of 2.5 million—was one of the largest African kingdoms. For a brief period, King João I of Kongo, who reigned from 1470 to 1509, had voluntarily converted to Catholicism, and for close to three centuries—from 1491 to 1750—the kingdom of Kongo had practiced Christianity and was an “independent and cosmopolitan realm.” The descendants of the rice-plantation enslaved Gullah people—whose country of origin is Sierra Leone—were unique because they had been much more isolated on the islands off the coast of South Carolina. Gullah spirituals are sung in a Creole language that was influenced by African American Vernacular English with the majority of African words coming from the Akan, Yoruba and Igbo. The institution of slavery in the United States ended with the conclusion of the US Civil War in 1865 (aside from the exception in the Thirteenth Ammendment allowing slavery for prisoners). The domestic slave trade that emerged after the United States Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808 and lasted until the U.S. Civil War destroyed generations of African American families. Slavery in the United States differed from the institution in other regions of the Americas, such as the West Indies, Dutch Guiana and Brazil.The U.S. system was unique because it became a self-sustaining factory of human misery. Survival did not equate to better treatment, it meant the system was efficient at keeping people alive long enough to reproduce and work. There is no evidence of better treatment in the U.S. During that period, “approximately 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America,” were displaced—spouses were separated from one another, and parents were separated from their children. By 1850, most enslaved African Americans were “third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.” In the 1800s, the majority of enslaved people in the British West Indies and Brazil had been born in Africa, whereas in the United States, they were “generations removed from Africa.”

African foundation#

J.H. Kwabena Nketia (1921–2019), described by the New York Times in 2019 as a “pre-eminent scholar of African music”, said in 1973 that there is an important, interdependent, dynamic, and “unbroken conceptual relationship between African and African American music”. Enslaved African Americans “in the plantation South drew on native rhythms and their African heritage.” According to a May 2012 PBS interview, “spirituals were religious folks songs, often rooted in biblical stories, woven together, sung, and passed along from one slave generation to another”. According to Walter Pitts’ 1996 book Old Ship of Zion, spirituals are a musical form that is indigenous and specific to the religious experience of African slaves and their descendants in the United States. Pitts said that they were a result of the interaction of music and religion from Africa with music and religion of European origin. In a May 2012 PBS interview, Uzee Brown Jr. said that spirituals were the “survival tools for the African slave”. They brought with them from Africa long-standing religious traditions that highlighted the importance of storytelling. Evidence of the vital role African music has played in the creation of African American spirituals exists, among other elements, in the use of “complex rhythms” and “polyrhythms” from West Africa.

Religion in everyday life#

According to the beliefs of slave religion, the “material and the spiritual are part of an intrinsic unity”. The spirituals provided some immunity protecting the African American religion from being colonized, and in this way preserved the “sacred as a potential space of resistance”. Spirituals were not simply different versions of hymns or Bible stories, but rather a creative altering of the material; new melodies and music, refashioned text, and stylistic differences helped to set apart the music as distinctly African-American. The First Great Awakening, or “Evangelical Revival”—a series of Christian revivals in the 1730s and 1740s swept Great Britain and its North American colonies, resulted in many enslaved people in the colonies being converting to Christianity. During that time northern Baptist and Methodist preachers converted African Americans, including those who were enslaved. In some communities African Americans were accepted into Christian communities as deacons. From 1800 to 1825 enslaved people were exposed to the religious music of camp meetings on the ever-expanding frontier. As African religious traditions declined in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, more African Americans began to convert to Christianity. In a 1982 “scathing critique” of Awakening scholars, Yale University historian, Jon Butler, wrote that the Awakening was a myth that has been constructed by historians in the 18th century who had attempted to use the narrative of the Awakening for their own “religious purposes”.

Biblical themes#

By the 17th century, enslaved Africans were familiar with Christian biblical stories, such as the story of Moses and Daniel, seeing their own stories reflected in them. An Africanized form of Christianity evolved in the slave population with African American spirituals providing a way to “express the community’s new faith, as well as its sorrows and hopes.” The river Jordan in traditional African American religious song became a symbolic borderland not only between this world and the next. It could also symbolize travel to the north and freedom or could signify a proverbial border from the status of slavery to living free. Syncopation, or ragged time, was a natural part of spiritual music. Songs were played on African-inspired instruments.

Collections of spiritual lyrics#

African-American spirituals have associations with plantation songs, slave songs, freedom songs, and songs of the Underground Railway, and were oral until the end of the US Civil War. Following the Civil War and emancipation, there has been “extensive collection and preservation of spirituals as folk song tradition”. The first collection of Negro spirituals was published in 1867, two years after the war had ended. Entitled Slave Songs of the United States, it was compiled by three northern abolitionists—Charles Pickard Ware (1840–1921), Lucy McKim Garrison (1842–1877), William Francis Allen (1830–1889) The 1867 compilation built on the entire collection of Charles P. Ware, who had mainly collected songs at Coffin’s Point, St. Helena Island, South Carolina, home to the African-American Gullah people originally from West Africa. Most of the 1867 book consisted of songs gathered directly from African Americans. Higginson admired the former slaves in his regiment saying, “It was their demeanor under arms that shamed the nation into recognizing them as men.” He mingled with the soldiers and in published his 1869 memoir Army Life in a Black Regiment in which he included the lyrics of selected spirituals. During the Civil War, Higginson wrote down some of the spirituals he heard in camp. “Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, …and were in a minor key, both as to words and music.” Starting in 1871, the Fisk Jubilee Singers began touring, creating more interest in the “spirituals as concert repertory”. By 1872, the Jubilee Singers were publishing their own books of songs, which included “The Gospel Train”. Reverend Alexander Reid had attended a Fisk Jubilee Singers’ performance in 1871, and suggested they add several songs to their repertoire. Reid, who had been a superintendent at the Spencerville Academy in Oklahoma in Choctaw Nation territory in the 1850s, had heard two workers enslaved by the Choctaw people,—an African-American family—father Wallace Willis and daughter Minerva Willis—singing “their favorite plantation songs” from their cabin door in the evenings. They had learned the songs in “Mississippi in their early youth.” Reid provided the Jubilee Singers with the lyrics of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, Roll, Jordan, Roll, “The Angels are Coming”, “I’m a Rolling”, and “Steal Away To Jesus”, and others that Willis and his wife had sung. The Jubilee Singers popularized Willis’ songs.

Fisk Jubilee Singers popularized spirituals#

The original Fisk Jubilee Singers, a touring a cappella male and female choir of nine students of the newly established Fisk school in Nashville, Tennessee who were active from 1871 to 1878, popularized Negro spirituals. By 1878 the Singers had disbanded. In 1890 the Singers legacy was revived when Ella Sheppard, Moore—one of the original nine Fisk Jubilee Singers—returned to Fisk and began to coach new jubilee vocalists, including John Wesley Work Jr. (1871–1925). In 1899, Fisk University president E. M. Cravath put out a call for a mixed (male and female) jubilee singers ensemble that would tour on behalf of the university.

Hampton Singers#

In 1873, the Hampton Singers formed a group in Hampton, Virginia at what is now known as Hampton University. They were the first ensemble to “rival the Jubilee Singers”. With Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882–1943) as conductor until 1933, Hampton Singers “earned an international following.”

Tuskegee Institute Quartet#

The first formal a cappella Tuskegee Quartet was organized in 1884 by Booker T. Washington, who was also the founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Since 1881, Washington had insisted that everyone attending their weekly religious services should join in singing African American spirituals. The Quartet was formed to “promote the interest of Tuskegee Institute”. In 1909 a new quartet was formed. The singers travelled intermittently until the 1940s. Like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Tuskegee Institute Singers sang spirituals in a modified harmonized style.

The concert spiritual tradition#

African American composers—Harry Burleigh, R. Nathaniel Dett, and William Dawson, created a “new repertoire for the concert stage” by applying their Western classical education to the spirituals. They brought spirituals to concert settings and mentored the next generation of professional spirituals musicians starting in the early 20th century. Harry Burleigh’s (1866–1949)—an African-American classical composer and baritone performed in many concert settings published Jubilee Songs of the United States in 1929, which made “spirituals available to solo concert singers as art songs for the first time”. Burleigh arranged spirituals with a classical form. He was also a baritone, who performed in many concert settings. He introduced classically trained artists, such as Antonín Dvořák to African-American spirituals. Some believe that Dvorak was inspired by the spirituals in his Symphony From the New World. He coached African-American soloists, such as Marian Anderson, as solo classical singers. Others, such as Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson continued his legacy. In 1918, he said, “We have this wonderful store of folk music—the melodies of an enslaved people” but it will be of no value if it is not used. We must treat spirituals “in such manner that it can be presented in choral form, in lyric and operatic works, in concertos and suites and salon music”. Boatner “maintained the importance of authenticity regarding the collection and transcription of spirituals, but also clearly identified with the new, stylized and polished ways in which they were arranged and performed”.

Spirituals in contemporary life#

The Fisk Jubilee Singers continue to maintain their popularity in the 21st century with live performances in locations such as Grand Ole Opry House in 2019 in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2019 Tazewell Thompson presented an cappella musical entitled Jubilee, which is a tribute to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Spirituals remain a mainstay particularly in small black churches, often Baptist or Pentecostal, in the deep South. Everett McCorvey founded The American Spiritual Ensemble in 1995, a group of about two dozen professional singers who tour performing spirituals in the United States and abroad. The group has produced several CDs, including “The Spirituals”, and is the focus of a public broadcasting documentary.

Stylistic origins and qualities#

Qualities of the spirituals include mastery of the blending of voices, timing, and intonation. In his 1954 book Studies in African Music, Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980), a missionary and ethnomusicologist, said that in African music, the “complex interweaving of contrasting rhythmic patterns” was central to African music, just as harmonies were valued in European music. Jones described the drum is the highest expression of rhythms, but they can also be produced through hand-clapping, stick-beating, rattles, and the “pounding of pestles in a mortar”. Over time “formal concert tradition has evolved,” which included the work of the Hampton Singers under composer R. Nathaniel Dett. In the 20th century, composers, such as Moses Hogan, Roland Carter, Jester Hairston, Brazeal Dennard and Wendell Whalum transformed the “cappella arrangements of spirituals for choruses” beyond its “traditional folk song roots”.

Call and response#

University of Denver professor, Arthur Jones, who established “The Spirituals Project in 1998, out of the university’s Lamont School of Music, described how coded words could be introduced in the call and response overlap, which only insiders aware of the encrypted message could understand. He described “already existing spirituals” were employed “clandestinely” as one of the many ways people used in their “multilayered struggle for freedom.”

Sorrow songs#

Slave songs were called “Sorrow Songs” by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. Sorrow songs are spirituals, such as, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”, and “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”—songs that are intense and melancholic—are sung at a slower pace.

Jubilee songs#

The Fisk Jubilee Singers had been so successful that other groups were created to perform similar music. Over time the term “jubilee” was used to refer to other ensembles who sang the original group’s repertoire. In the early 1900s jubilee singers also referred to singers who performed gospel music, and hymns as well as spirituals. Examples of these early nineteenth century groups include the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, the Utica Jubilee Singers, and the Tuskegee Institute Singers. Jubilee songs, also known as “camp meeting songs,” such as and “Fare Ye Well” and “Rocky my soul in the bosom of Abraham” are fast-paced, “rhythmic and often syncopated”. Spiritual songs which looked forward to a time of future happiness, or deliverance from tribulation, were often known as ‘jubilees. In some churches, such as the Pentecostal church in the 1910s and 1920s in New Orleans, there was no organ or choir and music was louder, more exuberant and included up tempo spirituals called “jubilees”. They “used the drum, the cymbal, the tambourine, and the steel triangle. Everybody in there sang, and they clapped and stomped their feet, and sang with their whole bodies. They had a beat, a rhythm we held on to from slavery days, and their music was so strong and expressive.”

Freedom songs#

Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and a former slave said that slave songs awakened him to the dehumanizing character of slavery, “The mere recurrence, even now, afflicts my spirit, and while I am writing these lines, my tears are falling. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conceptions of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds. In a 2017 PBS Newshour, segment entitled “Singing in Slavery: Songs of Survival, Songs of Freedom” said that, while it is “has not been proven, it is believed”—that “Wade in the Water” was one of the songs associated with the Underground Railroad—a network of secret routes and safe houses used by slaves in the United States to find freedom. warn slaves to get off the trail and into the water to prevent bloodhounds—used by the slavers—from following their trail. Jones described how during the years of the Underground Railroad “already existing spirituals” were employed “clandestinely” as one of the many ways people used in their “multilayered struggle for freedom.” Certain songs were believed to have contained explicit instructions to fugitive slaves on how to avoid capture and the route to take to successfully make their way to freedom. Other spirituals that some believe have coded messages include “The Gospel Train”, “Song of the Free”, and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, “Follow the Drinking Gourd”. James Kelley in his 2008 article said that there is a lack of corroborating sources to prove that there is a coded message in “Follow the Drinking Gourd”. One 1953 article by Sterling Brown said that there are scholars who “believe that when the Negro sang of freedom, he meant only what the whites meant, namely freedom from sin.” Brown said that, to an enslaved person freedom would also mean freedom from slavery.

Genre family: American folk music, Choral music genres