There are hundreds of African American spirituals, including many variations of popular and widely known songs. Predominantly dealing with biblical and religious themes, a great number were written anonymously during the period of African American enslavement before the U.S. Civil War. An early student of the genre, Colonel Thomas Higginson, published an essay on spirituals in the Atlantic Monthly in 1867, which described the songs he heard among the black soldiers of his African American regiment and in the displaced persons camps (Higginson 1867). The first published collections of spirituals based on field study was Allen, Ware, and Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States (1867). However, it was not until the American and European tours of the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, beginning in 1871, that the wider world was introduced to this musical form as a serious tradition, especially a tradition liberated from the ridicule of the minstrel shows (Ward 2000).
Spirituals include a number of important themes, drawn both from the Bible and also the lives of the people for whom they were a comfort and inspiration. For example, Moses was seen as symbolizing freedom because of his role leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt. In the famous spiritual “Go Down, Moses” the message is clear:
Go Down, Moses
Way down in Egypt Land
Tell ole Pharaoh
Let my People Go. (Peters 1993, 166)
In this photograph, Coretta Scott King sings a traditional spiritual at a Memphis civil rights rally in 1968. Spirituals comprise an important segment of the American folk tradition in the United States and they trace their roots to African American communities in the pre–Civil War era. (AP Photo)
A famous tradition tells that Louis Armstrong would regularly amend the words to: “tell ALL Pharaohs.” Similarly, the biblical traditions of Daniel were admired for stories of surviving a number of challenges, the most famous of which was the lion’s den. In “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” the theme becomes a powerful call to freedom:
He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
Jonah from the belly of the whale,
And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,
And why not every man. (Peters 1993, 163)
Lovell writes of the Daniel songs:
The slave admired Daniel because he would not submit to the tyrant no matter how much power the tyrant had. In the slave’s eyes, he and Daniel were in the same boat; the slave would not submit in his heart to the institution of slavery, although he momentarily worked as a slave. (Lovell 1972, 329)
Folk music in general and spirituals in particular often inspired intense popular reactions. When spirituals became popular in the early twentieth century, critics tried to deny their originality by suggesting that the spirituals were merely copies of European American hymns and folk songs. These critics were not sympathetic to the idea that African Americans made vital contributions to American culture. In White and Negro Spirituals (1944) George Jackson provided examples of what he thought were “copied” songs, but he missed the implication of the significant change in lyrics. Consider the “white” version of one of his examples:
With You to the End, Jesus my all to heav’n is gone,
and he’s promis’d to be with us to the end.
This same tune, however, carries the following lyrics in his proposed African American version of the same song:
To turn back Pharaoh’s army, hallelujah,
to turn back Pharaoh’s army. (Jackson 1944, 174–175)
In fact, many contemporary authors have noted the powerful social and political content of spirituals in combination with then-popular religious themes (Cone 1972; Levine 1977). It is especially interesting to note that contemporary technological developments were taken up into the lyrics of spirituals as well, perhaps most famously the train, which only began to be used in the United States in 1830 and arrived in the South much later. Songs like “The Freedom Train” and “The Gospel Train” showed a continued creativity in the spirituals tradition. Spirituals have often been cited as the creative root of later styles of American music, including gospel but also blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues (Lovell 1972; Cone 1972; Darden 2004).
Daniel Lawrence Smith-Christopher
See also Blues as Folklore; Minstrel Shows
Further Reading
Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, eds. [1867] 2011. Slave Songs of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Cone, James H. 1972. The Spirituals and the Blues. New York: Orbis Books.
Darden, Robert. 2004. People Get Ready! A New History of Black Gospel Music. New York: Continuum.
Higginson, Thomas. 1867. “Negro Spirituals.” Atlantic Monthly 19 (June): 685–694. Reprinted in B. Katz, ed. 1969. The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States. New York: Arno/NY Times.
Jackson, George Pullen. 1944. White and Negro Spirituals: Their Life Span and Kinship. New York: J. J. Augustin.
Levine, Lawrence. 1977. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lovell, John. 1972. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. New York: Paragon.
Peters, Erskine, ed. 1993. Lyrics of the Afro-American Spiritual: A Documentary Collection. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Ward, Andrew. 2000. Dark Midnight When I Rise: The Story of the Jubilee Singers Who Introduced the World to the Music of Black America. New York: HarperCollins.