Spirituals

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 still 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 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. 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." ==Overview==

from his 1845 narrative In his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an essay on abolition and a memoire, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)—a great orator—described slave songs as telling a "tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains… Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds." His Narrative, which is the most famous of the stories written by former enslaved at that time, is one of the most influential pieces of literature that acted as a catalyst in the early years of the American abolitionist movement, according to the OCLC entry. Slave songs were called "Sorrow songs" by W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. Hansonia Caldwell, the author of African American music, spirituals: the fundamental communal music of Black Americans and African American music: a chronology : 1619–1995, said that spirituals "sustained Africans when they were enslaved." She described them as "code songs" that "would announce meetings, as in "Steal Away", and describe the path for running away, as in "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd". "Go Down Moses" referred to Harriet Tubman – that was her nickname—so that when they heard that song, they knew she was coming to the area...I often call the spiritual an omnibus term, because there are lots of different [subcategories] under it. They used to sing songs as they worked in the fields. In the church, it evolved into the gospel song. In the fields, it became the blues." Spirituals were originally oral, but by 1867 the first compilation, entitled "Slave Songbook", was published. The 1867 publication included spirituals that were well-known and regularly sung in American churches but whose origins in plantations, had not been acknowledged. In their 1925 book, The Books of American Negro Spirituals, James Weldon Johnson and Grace Nail Johnson said that spirituals, which are "purely and solely the creation" of African Americans, represent "America's only type of folk music...When it came to the use of words, the maker of the song was struggling under his limitations in language and, perhaps, also under a misconstruction or misapprehension of the facts in his source of material, generally the Bible." Spirituals were created by a "circumscribed community of people in bondage", over time they became known as the first "signature" music of the United States. Forbidden to speak their native languages, they generally converted to Christianity. With narrow vocabularies, they used the words they did know to translate biblical information and facts from their other sources into song. ==Cultural origins==

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. ==Popularization==

Fisk Jubilee Singers popularized spirituals , 1875 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." 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. , 1936 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," He described "already existing spirituals" were employed "clandestinely" as one of the many ways people used in their "multilayered struggle for freedom." 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. Work songs In the 1927 anthology, The American Songbag, compiled by Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), the American poet and folklorist, he wrote that "Ain' Go'n' to Study War No Mo'" was an example of a spiritual that African Americans used as work songs. He said, that, "As the singers go on, hour by hour, they bring in lines from many other spirituals. The tempo is vital. Never actually monotonous. Never ecstatic, yet steady in its onflow, sure of its pulses. It is a work song-spiritual. War is pronounced "wah" or "waw" as if to rhyme with "saw." Horse is "hawss." And so on with Negro economy of vocables in speech and song." Field hollers Field holler music, also known as levee camp holler music, was an early form of African American music, described in the 19th century. Field hollers, cries and hollers of the enslaved people and later sharecroppers working in cotton fields, prison chain gangs, railway gangs (gandy dancers) or turpentine camps were the precursor to the call and response of African American spirituals and gospel music, to jug bands, minstrel shows, stride piano, and ultimately to the blues, rhythm and blues, jazz and African American music in general. ==Derivatives==

Blues and gospel music are derivatives of African American spirituals. The blues In the early 1960s, Blues People by Amiri Baraka—the chosen name for LeRoi Jones (1934–2014)—provided a history of African Americans through their music, beginning with the spirituals to the blues. By 1967, Jones had become the main spokesperson for African American intellectuals, displacing James Baldwin, according to a 1965 review of Blues People. The blues form originated in the 1860s in the Deep South—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas—states that were most dependent on the slave labor on plantations and that held the largest number of enslaved people. The form was collectively developed by generations and communities of enslaved African Americans starting as "unaccompanied work-songs of the plantation culture". The historical roots of the blues have been traced farther back to West African sources by scholars such as Paul Oliver and Gerhard Kubik—with elements such as the "responsorial 'leader-and-chorus' form". The blues became the "most extensively recorded of all traditional music types" and since the "early 1960s,—the "most important single influence on the development of Western popular music," When Mamie Smith's August 10, 1920, Okeh recording of the composer Perry Bradford's (1893–1970) New York City Crazy Blues became a commercial success, it opened the commercial record market for music for an African American audience. Prior to the success of this recording, commercial recording companies featured non-African American musicians playing African-American music. Bradford's African-American band, the Jazz Hounds, "played live, improvised", "unpredictable", "breakneck" music that was a "refreshing contrast to the buttoned-up versions of the blues interpreted by white artists across the 1910s". Horace Clarence Boyer traced the emergence of Gospel music as a "discrete musical style" to the Deep South in 1906 in Pentecostal churches. Through the Great Migration of African American from the south to the north, especially in the 1930s, gospel songs entered the "mainstream of American popular culture". Gospel music had its heyday from 1945 to 1955—the "Golden Age of Gospel." Gospel Quartets, like the Golden Jubilee Quartet and the Golden Gate Quartet, changed the style of spirituals with their innovative, jubilee style which included new harmonies, syncopation with sophisticated arrangements. An example of their music was their performance of "Oh, Jonah!" The Golden Gate Quartet—who were active from 1934 to the late 1940s—performed in the concert From Spirituals to Swing at Carnegie Hall in the late 1930s. White spirituals In his 1938 book, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, Vanderbilt University's George Pullen Jackson in Nashville drew attention to the existence of a white spiritual genre which differed in many aspects from African American spirituals. The core of Jackson's argument, however, supported by many musical examples, is that African-American spirituals draw heavily on textual and melodic elements found in white hymns and spiritual songs. Jackson extended the term "spirituals" to a wider range of folk hymnody but this does not appear to have been widespread usage previously. The term, however, has often been broadened to include subsequent arrangements into more standard European-American hymnodic styles, and to include post-emancipation songs with stylistic similarities to the original African American spirituals. ==Possible Islamic influences==

The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence. Diouf notes a resemblance between the Islamic call to prayer (originating from Bilal ibn Rabah, a famous Abyssinian African Muslim in the early 7th century) and 19th-century field holler music, noting that both have similar lyrics praising God, melody, note changes, "words that seem to quiver and shake" in the vocal chords, dramatic changes in musical scales, and nasal intonation. She attributes the origins of field holler music to African Muslim slaves who accounted for an estimated 30% of African slaves in America. According to Kubik, "the vocal style of many blues singers using melisma, wavy intonation, and so forth is a heritage of that large region of West Africa that had been in contact with the Arabic-Islamic world of the Maghreb since the seventh and eighth centuries." There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel. There was a difference in the music performed by the predominantly Muslim Sahelian slaves and the predominantly non-Muslim slaves from coastal West Africa and Central Africa. The Sahelian Muslim slaves generally favored wind and string instruments and solo singing, whereas the non-Muslim slaves generally favored drums and group chants. Plantation owners who feared revolt outlawed drums and group chants, but allowed the Sahelian slaves to continue singing and playing their wind and string instruments, which the plantation owners found less threatening. According to Curiel stringed instruments these string instruments may have the precursor to the banjo. While many were pressured to convert to Christianity, the Sahelian slaves were allowed to maintain their musical traditions, adapting their skills to instruments such as the fiddle and guitar. Some were also allowed to perform at balls for slave-holders, allowing the migration of their music across the Deep South. ==See also==