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Spirituals

Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals,[1] Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans,[2][3][4] which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade[5] and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church.[6] In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs.[7][8][9] While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature (but not continuation) of slavery for many.[10] Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft.[11]

For other uses, see Spirituals (disambiguation).

Spiritual

Prior to the end of the US Civil War and emancipation, spirituals were originally an oral tradition passed from one slave generation to the next. Biblical stories were memorized then translated into song. Following emancipation, the lyrics of spirituals were published in printed form. Ensembles such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers—established in 1871—popularized spirituals, bringing them to a wider, even international, audience.


At first, major recording studios were only recording white musicians performing spirituals and their derivatives. That changed with Mamie Smith's commercial success in 1920.[12] Starting in the 1920s, the commercial recording industry increased the audience for the spirituals and their derivatives.


Black composers, Harry Burleigh and R. Nathaniel Dett, created a "new repertoire for the concert stage" by applying their Western classical education to the spirituals.[13] While the 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.[14]

Terminology[edit]

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—one of the largest reference works on music and musicians,[15]: 284–290 —itemized and described "spiritual" in their 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."[3] They used the term without the descriptor, "African American".


The term "negro spirituals" is a 19th century word "used for songs with religious texts created by African Enslaved in America".[7] The first published book of slave songs referred to them as "spirituals".[16]


In musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1990s, the single term "spirituals" is used to describe "The Spirituals Project".[17]


The US Library of Congress uses the phrase "African American Spirituals", for the numbered and itemized entry.[18] In the introductory phrase, the singular form is used without the adjective "African American." Throughout the encyclopedic entry the singular and plural form of the term, is used without the "African American" descriptor. The LOC introductory sentence says, "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."[18]

Context[edit]

The transatlantic slave trade is described by a United Nations report as the largest forced migration in recorded human history.[5] An estimated 90% of transatlantic African Enslaved were captured by other Africans and sold to Europeans.[19] Millions more remained enslaved in Africa, where slavery was a complex and deeply-rooted part of culture going back centuries before widespread European presence on the continent.[20][21][22][23][24][25]


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.[4] 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.[26] Other sources estimate the Islamic slave trade enslaved similar numbers of Africans, with between 8 million and 17 million individuals taken from Africa between the 8th and 19th centuries along the Trans-Saharan trade routes.[27][28][29][30][31]


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 African Enslaved people under Spanish control.[32] 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.[33] 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.[34] The Kingdom of Kongo, at that time stretched over an area of 60,000 miles (97,000 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."[35][36] 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.[37][38] 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.[26] Slavery in the United States differed from the institution in other regions of the Americas, such as the West Indies, Dutch Guiana and Brazil. In the U.S., the enslaved had higher rates of survival and thus there was a "high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half—with numbers nearly tripling by the end of the domestic slave trade in the 1860s." 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.[26] By 1850, most enslaved African Americans were "third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans."[26] 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."[26]

Cultural origins[edit]

African foundation[edit]

J.H. Kwabena Nketia (1921–2019) described by the New York Times in 2019, as a "pre-eminent scholar of African music",[48] said in 1973 that there is an important, interdependent, dynamic, and "unbroken conceptual relationship between African and African American music".[11]: 7–15 [49]


Enslaved African Americans "in the plantation South drew on native rhythms and their African heritage."[50] 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".[51][Notes 1][Notes 2][Notes 3]


According to Walter Pitt's 1996 book, spirituals are a musical form that is indigenous and specific to the religious experience 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.[52]: 74 


In a May 2012 PBS interview, Uzee Brown, Jr. said that spirituals were the "survival tools for the African slave".[51] Brown said that while other similarly-oppressed cultures were "virtually wiped out", the African slave survived because of spirituals by "singing through many of their problems", by creating their own "way of communicating".[51] Enslaved people introduced a number of new instruments to America: the bones, body percussion, and an instrument variously called the bania, banju, or banjar, a precursor to the banjo but without frets.[51] They brought with them from Africa long-standing religious traditions that highlighted the importance of storytelling.[53][54]


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.[11]: 7–15 

Religion in everyday life[edit]

According to the beliefs of slave religion—the "material and the spiritual are part of an intrinsic unity".[55] Music, religion, and everyday life are inseparable in the spirituals, and through them, religious ideals were infused into the activities of everyday life.[55]: 372  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".[55]: 372  A 2015 article in the Journal of Black Studies said that it was not surprising therefore that "spirituals were sung primarily as rowing songs, field songs, work songs, and social songs, rather than exclusively within the church."[55]: 372  The article described how, "through the use of metonymy (substituting associated words to ostensibly alter the semantic content), spirituals acted as a form of religious education, able to speak simultaneously of material and spiritual freedom", for example in the spiritual, "Steal Away to Jesus".[55]: 372 


In William Eleazar Barton's (1899–1972) Old Plantation Hymns, the author wrote that African American "hymns seldom make allusion to the Bible as a source of inspiration. They prefer "heart religion" to "book religion". Barton, who attended services with African Americans, said that they did not sing the "ordinary" hymns that strengthened "assurance by a promise of God in Holy Scripture"; rather, in the African-American hymns, they appeal to a more personal "revelation from the Lord." He cites the examples of "We're Some of the Praying People" and a hymn from Alabama—"Wear a starry crown". He also notes that both these songs have a "threefold repetition and a concluding line." : 16  In the latter, we find the "familiar swing and syncopation" of the African American.[56]


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.[57][58]


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.[59] 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.[60] From 1800 to 1825 enslaved people were exposed to the religious music of camp meetings on the ever-expanding frontier.[9] As African religious traditions declined in America in the 18th and 19th centuries, more African Americans began to convert to Christianity.[61] 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".[62]

Biblical themes[edit]

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."[44]


As Africans were exposed to stories from the Bible, they began to see parallels to their own experiences. The story of the exile of the Jews and their captivity in Babylon, resonated with their own captivity.[59]


The lyrics of Christian spirituals reference symbolic aspects of Biblical images such as Moses and Israel's Exodus from Egypt in songs such as "Michael Row the Boat Ashore". There is also a duality in the lyrics of spirituals. They communicated many Christian ideals while also communicating the hardship that was a result of being an enslaved.[63] 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.[64]


Syncopation, or ragged time, was a natural part of spiritual music. Songs were played on African-inspired instruments.[65]

Spirituals in contemporary life[edit]

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.[87] In 2019 Tazewell Thompson presented an cappella musical entitled Jubilee, which is a tribute to the Fisk Jubilee Singers.[88]


Spirituals remain a mainstay particularly in small black churches, often Baptist or Pentecostal, in the deep South.[89]


The latter half of the 20th century saw a resurgence of the spiritual. This trend was impacted strongly by composers and musical directors such as Moses Hogan and Brazeal Dennard.


Arthur Jones founded "The Spirituals Project" at the University of Denver in 1999 to help keep alive the message and meaning of the songs that had moved from the fields of the South to the concert halls of the North.[89]


Everett McCorvey founded The American Spiritual Ensemble[90] 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",[91] and is the focus of a public broadcasting documentary.[92]

Possible Islamic influences[edit]

The historian Sylviane Diouf and ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik identify Islamic music as an influence.[94][132] 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."[94][132] There was particularly a significant trans-Saharan cross-fertilization between the musical traditions of the Maghreb and the Sahel.[132]


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.[132] According to Curiel stringed instruments these string instruments may have the precursor to the banjo.[94] 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.[132]

African-American music

Deep River Boys

Gospel music

History of slavery in the United States

Original Nashville Students

Religious music

Songs of the Underground Railroad

Baraka, Amiri (1999). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Harper Perennial.  978-0688184742.

ISBN

Bauch, Marc A. (2013). Extending the Canon: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and African-American Spirituals. Munich, Germany.

Caldwell, Hansonia L (2003). African American music, spirituals: the fundamental communal music of Black Americans. Culver City, California: Ikoro Communications.  978-0-9650441-5-8.

ISBN

Caldwell, Hansonia L. (1996). African American music: a chronology : 1619–1995 (First ed.). Los Angeles, California: Ikoro Communications.  978-0-9650441-0-3.

ISBN

Koskoff, Ellen, Ed. The . Volume 3: The United States and Canada (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2001) pp. 624–629; also pp. 523–524, pp. 68–69

Garland Encyclopedia of World Music

Nash, Elizabeth (2007). "Autobiographical Reminiscences of African-American Classical Singers, 1853–Present". Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.  0-7734-5250-8

ISBN

The on the Library of Congress web portal contains many examples of digitized recordings and sheet music of spirituals.

Performing Arts Encyclopedia

The also houses a special digitized American choral music collection which features arrangements of spirituals by composers like Henry T. Burleigh and R. Nathaniel Dett.

Performing Arts Encyclopedia

Work, John W., compiler (1940), American Negro Songs and Spirituals: a Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular, with a Foreword. New York: Bonanza Books. N.B.: Includes commentary on the repertory and the words with the music (harmonized) of the spirituals and other songs anthologized.

Sweet Chariot: the story of the spirituals

Fisk Jubilee Singers

Marian Anderson: A Life in Song

including 75 African American spirituals with downloadable arrangements for solo instrument

Historical Notes on African American melodies

Free Gospel sheet music

searchable discography of spirituals for solo voice

The Spirituals Database