Books on the Spirituals    

The Negro and His Music (Locke) / The Spiritual and the Blues: An Interpretation (Cone) / Best Loved Spirituals  (Mahalia)

The Book of the American negro Spirituals (Johnson) / American Negro Songs: Folk Songs and Spirituals (Work)

Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death (Thurman)

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Negro Spirituals and American Culture

By Regina Dolan

In the St. Augustine Seminary in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, future priests are encouraged to study and interpret spirituals as part of the basic culture of their people. The appeal, pathos, and harmony of these songs are recognized by great musicians all over the world. They constitute the chief treasury of folk-songs that are peculiarly American in origin and character by reason of the Negro’s historical place in our comparative brief existence as a nation.

Some consider the spirituals' melody vastly superior to its verse. They reason that these songs were composed when the Negro’s lack of education forced him to concentrate on rhythm and harmony, the inherent parts of his native genius that needed no formal schooling for expression. Slaves of the Southern plantation relied on Bible text for verse themes. In the story of the children of Israel in bondage in Egypt, they found a striking symbol of their own status. The famous “Go Down, Moses” is an excellent example of this analogy. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” has a touch of the whimsy in the invitation to the chariot of Elias to swing low, so that the soul may enjoy its ride to heaven.

The supercilious may dub spirituals naïve and sentimental, overlooking the fact that they took birth from the heart-break of a race, helpless before self-appointed masters. Such songs as “Is Massa Goin’ to Sell Us Tomorrow?” and “Farewell To My Only Child” sprang from the slave’s dread of family separation. It is interesting to note that in the Southern South, e. g. Virginia, where there was more sense of permanence on a family plantation, the spirituals were more buoyant and joyful. On the other hand, in other sections where slaves were more often abused, the spirituals were fraught with sorrow and foreboding. “I Feel Like A Motherless Child” is not only a reflection of this insecurity, but it embodies the emotion of down-trodden people everywhere.

Although the Indian possessed a goodly store of folk songs, he failed to become the fount of America’s folk music, because the Negro’s greater rhythmic swing and melodic freedom produced music with a more widespread appeal. Then, too, the more varied emotional life of the Negro slave ranging from light-hearted irresponsibility to gaunt tragedy motivated a richer more diverse folk song.

Spirituals are a spontaneous outpouring in music of the Negro slave’s deep religious faith. This devotedness did not blind him to his wrongs, and many slave uprisings occurred in the two decades preceding the Civil War. But the slave’s faith clarified for him the paradox of “man’s inhumanity to man” without lessening his confidence in God and ultimate justice. Therefore, the Negro sang of a celestial home where at last he would have his rightful place as a free being. He studded the spirituals with poetical allusions whose simplicity and imagery have made them classic gems. In the Psalms of Israel, you will find the only counterpart of the spirituals, for the former were also creations of a people with exalted belief in their possession of great religious truth.

In 1856, Dwight’s Journal of Music printed the first article in the United States of Negro spirituals. For the first time in our history, the song-loving Negro was contrasted favorably with the white citizens who performed his chores sans melody and who sang self-consciously on prescribed occasions. A Philadelphia woman, Lucy McKim, was the pioneer of spiritual recording, when she took down “Poor Rosy” from the singing of an old Negress in 1862. She found it impossible to get every nuance of the melody into her composition. Five years later, she collaborated with William Allen and Charles Ware in editing a volume of spirituals. An enthusiastic assistant of the trio was Colonel T. Higginson, an ex-Union Army Officer who had been so thrilled during the Civil War when he first heard these songs that he eagerly spread the news of his discovery among music-loving friends. Another boost for spirituals came from Henry Krehbiel, a music critic of note, when he gave them a serious criticism in his “Afro-American Folk Songs”.

Until this time most of the slave owners had held spirituals in contempt as a result of their white supremacy fixation.

Although in his ballads Stephen Foster sentimentalized the spiritual, his work appealed distinctly to the average American of his day and still appeals to a wide audience. Like James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” Foster’s “My Ole Kentucky Home” has become part of the American musical tradition. The pseudo-spirituals which sprang up in the 1870 to 1900 period were also a definite contribution to American music, although they were not true songs of the people as sung by them. These concerts and glee club renditions could not possibly capture the unique character of a spiritual. For had it not been composed by a congregation inspired by overpowering religious emotion with choral improvisions on the theme, which were familiar to all participants? Only a phonograph can faithfully record the unique breaks and tricks of the true spiritual.

Dr. Alain Locke of Howard University defines spiritual as “one of the great classic expressions of all time of religious emotions and Christian moods and attitudes.” Fisk University was fated to give America and Europe a wide and popular introduction to these songs. In the fall of 1871, eleven students left Fisk’s campus to help raise a twenty-thousand dollar fund by singing the songs of their own race. Under the name, “Jubilee Singers”, they traveled through Ohio, New York, and New England until May, captivating audiences everywhere. This was the first time that a large number of Americans heard these moving songs. The following year, Theodore Seward of New Jersey, made the spirituals accessible in harmonized form when he published his volume of “Jubilee Songs”.

Henry Ward Beecher urged the Jubilee Singers to come to Brooklyn, and the engagement led to an invitation to participate in the World’s Peace Jubilee. The second tour of the Fisk’s students transported them to the British Isles, and from there they extended their “singing Campaign” to Germany and Holland. Spurred on by their success, the Hampton Institute Singers trained by Thomas Fenner gave concerts in New England in 1874 for their building fund. Thus the American public made the acquaintance of another group of spirituals. The publication of “Cabin and Plantation Songs,” appeared at this time to foster and maintain popular interest.

Many musical historians affirm that the most effective aid to the international recognition of the spirituals came from a Bohemian visitor to our shores. The keen ear of the composer, Anton Drovak, caught a fresh tone and peculiarly American flavor in the melodies. In his rapt appreciation, he pronounced them “the most striking and appealing melodies that have ever been found on this side of the Atlantic.” Why, he wondered in astonishment, did Americans strive so hard to intimate European music while they ignored this rich vein of song that was distinctly their own?

Transforming an idea into an achievement, Anton Drovak blended deftly into the theme of his symphony, “From the New World”, the Negro spiritual “Goin’ Home Lord, Ah’m Goin’ Home” as the American background. In 1894, a spellbound audience listened to his creation at Carnegie Hall and many reappraised their concept of the Plantation Songs’ merits. It was Harry Burleigh, while a student at the National Conservatory, who revealed to Drovak the epic quality of the spirituals by his vocal interpretations of them. Later this young Negro was destined to bring the spirituals to the concert stage and remind his conservatory-trained colleagues that the folk song of their people deserved artistic treatment.

The next great figure to discover the spiritual was Samuel Coleridge Taylor, an Anglo-Negro of London and the most renowned musician of his race. In 1904, at the suggestion of the editor of the Musicians’ Library, he transcribed sixteen American Negro spirituals for the piano. In the work, the Negro melodies were treated in an artistic form for the first time. A member of the Jubilee Singers, Frederick Loudin, first taught Samuel to appreciate Negro folk music. Until this period, spirituals had been considered essentially for group singing. There was nothing in the published versions of them then to qualify these songs for solo singing with a piano accompaniment or to inspire singers to make use of them. In fact, spirituals were inaccurately termed Negro “gospel hymns” by most Americans.

Today, spirituals and even secular Negro folk melodies and their harmonic style are regarded as the purest and most valuable musical lore in America. The most common reaction of musical authorities is that they are not sentimental or theatrical, but epic, and full of simple dignity.

Dr. Alain Locke holds that spirituals are mainly choral in character and are not at their best in solo voice or instrument. He predicts that they will have their truest development in symphonic choir, such as the great Russian composer have brought to their folk music. He asserts at this stage, the spirituals will reachieve their folk atmosphere and epic religious quality.

Dr. Locke in his book, The Negro and His Music, deplores the preponderance of pseudo-spirituals of today, and remarks that folk compositions have often been given artificial composition and disguised with musical frills in sentimental and concert versions. He regrets that educated Negroes too often shun the spiritual because of its unhappy connotation with slavery and illiteracy. However, outstanding Negro artists and choral groups are breaking down the antipathy by faithful and understanding renditions of these beautiful melodies.

Typical of such musicians are the Eva Jessye Choir and the Hall Johnson Singers, who have (in the opinion of Dr. Locke) given the most accurate reproduction of genuine Negro singing. They both have the actual mechanism of the improvised Negro choral singing with its syllabic quavers, off tones and tone glides, improvised interpolations and subtle rhythmic variations. Some musical authorities complain that in most conventional versions of spirituals, there is too much melody and harmony. They assert that if you over-emphasize the melodic elements of the spirituals, you produce a sentimental ballad of the Stephen Foster type. If you stress harmony, you get barber-shop choruses and if you concentrate on rhythmic idiom, you secularize the product, and the result is only a syncopated shout with the religious mood completely vanished. What then? Only in the subtle fusing of these elements does the genuine folk spiritual come forth.

Today the spirituals are caught between folklore and art-form. Their ever-mounting popularity has brought a very dangerous tendency to sophistication and over-elaboration. Even Negro composers have been too strongly influenced by formal European idioms and mannerisms in setting the spiritual.

It is essential to keep in mind that the folk songs has many styles. The idiom of the spiritual calls for choral arrangement according to some critics, who believe the vital, sustained background of accompanying voices is most important. Such celebrated Negro artists as Nathaniel Dett, William Dawson, Ballanta Taylor, and Lawrence Brown have written effective solo verses, but are turning with increasing interest to the choral form. If it is developed along lines of its own originality, we may expect an evolution of the Negro folk song, that may equal or perhaps surpass the choral music of old Russia.

According to Olin Downes, the flower of Negro music blooms forth in singing. Of course, de does not mean that the Negroes were to restrict themselves solely to this form of musical expression. He felt their peculiar genius was at its apex in vocal presentation. Other modern musical scholars look to the spiritual to supply great liturgical works of the future.

In Charleston, South Carolina, the Society for the Preservation of the Spirituals was organized by a group of white singers. Their ardent interest is a striking symbol of the growing realization that it is the common duty of all Americans to cherish and restore the spirituals as an intrinsic part of our country’s musical lore. For these songs, from the bitter wellspring of suffering and tribulation, represent the only music America can claim as her own-all else had its origins in the Old World.

Source: Interracial Review (April 1958)

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