spirituals

The tradition & historical record

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, which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals incorporate the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. 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. Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft. These songs were used to share coded messages, unite people, express feelings and emotions, and to keep their culture alive throughout the generations. They eventually were performed in churches, schools, and concerts. This form of African-American heritage influenced music around the world. Beyond their musical significance, spirituals played a crucial role in encouraging and uplifting African Americans throughout history. ¹

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 musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1990s, the single term "spirituals" is used to describe "The Spirituals Project". The US Library of Congress uses the phrase "African American Spirituals" for the numbered and itemized entry. 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." ¹

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. ¹

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. ¹

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 biblica… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Spirituals”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

spirituals is music genre created by generations of African-Americans, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 35 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²