AT A GLANCE

Spirituals

6 articles on Spirituals

• Spirituals

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

  Word Count: 1352      Includes:  Bibliography

  Originating during the seventeenth century in America, spirituals constitute the body of religious folk songs created by enslaved Africans. White observers had begun to notice differences between African-style music and European music as early as 1637. By 1800 some listeners were able to write down refrains they had heard in slave songs, and during the 1830s came the earliest attempts to notate slave music.

  Primarily a vocal music, the spirituals of the colonial period were rooted in the musical traditions of Africa. Several musical practices emerged and crystallized during this period—including communal participation, improvisation, repetition, and strophic form. Communal participation is a distinctive African characteristic important to the African American spiritual. The performance of spirituals reflected this cultural value in two ways. First, the predominant structure of the spiritual was a call-and-response pattern involving solo verses alternating with refrain lines—bearing in mind ...
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• Spirituals

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

  Word Count: 3159      Includes:  History and Scholarship. | Evolution from Folk Song to Concert Spiritual. | Controversies and Future Outlook. | Bibliography

  The roots of the spiritual tradition in music date to the antebellum period in American history. Initially, these songs were largely the religious expressions of enslaved African American Protestant Christians, although the music was frequently performed outside the church by individuals whose belief systems reflected the influence of both the Protestant and Catholic churches and who brought to the music an emotional intensity, performance styles, and other ideas that were characteristic of many traditional African religions.

  After the Civil War and the end of legal slavery in 1865, the many resulting changes in African American social, political, economic, and cultural experience were reflected in the history of the spiritual, as the songs evolved from ritual instruments and cultural artifacts to an ...
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• Spirituals, African American

  Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

  Word Count: 3793      Includes:  Cultural Synthesis | Music of the People | Religious Songs | Experiencing the Bible | Hidden Messages | New Poetics | Saving the Spirituals

  Over the years immigrant groups from across the world have brought their national music to America, but aside from Native Americans, African Americans were the first to create an indigenous American music. The African experience was unique: stolen from their homes, transported involuntarily in chains, and sentenced to lifetimes of Slavery, Africans were cut off from their various ethnic cultures and their languages. Their first challenge in America, therefore, was to transcend their different traditions and come together as a single people. During that process an astonishing and still little-recognized cultural interchange and transformation took place.

  As Africans were themselves uniting, they were at the same time thrown into constant contact ...
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• Spirituals

  Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition

  Word Count: 5537      Includes:  The Folk Spiritual | The Spiritual and the Preacher | The Content of Folk Spirituals | The Form of Folk Spirituals | The Arranged Spiritual | Arrangers | Spirituals Present | Spirituals Future | Bibliography

  Spirituals are three-way conversations among Africa past, present, and future. These ancestral dialogues link all aspects of African culture to African American people. Spirituals offer a sense of history and hope in the face of urgent struggles. Thanks to oral traditions, spirituals survived centuries of African diaspora and the era of slavery in America. African Americans survived thanks to the sustaining power of spirituals. Sacred and secular songs helped West African captives preserve indigenous orishas, religious rites, performance practices, and their deathless spirit.

  For the West African, all song is at once sacred and functional. All music is spiritual. Across the generations, grandmothers recall their Nana and Big Mama humming young'ns to sleep and singing themselves through work ...
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• Spirituals

  Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History

  Word Count: 777     

  an African-American musical tradition rooted in slave folk songs. Controversy surrounded the Christianization of slaves in the mid–seventeenth century. Many slaveowners argued that slaves did not possess souls and therefore needed no religious instruction; others contended that slaves did possess souls but as long as they were not Christianized they could be held in bondage. Attempting to solve the discrepancy, a Virginia law of 1667 stated, “Baptism doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom.” Thereafter slaveowners, with varying degrees of commitment, addressed the religious education of the slaves.

  At first attending religious services segregated by race (and gender), slaves gradually accepted Christianity. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century, however, did slaves adopt Christianity in large numbers. This was accomplished ...
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• Negro Spirituals (1867)

  Word Count: 6426     
  The first serious attempt to catalogue the lyrics of the music of African slaves and freemen and women in the United States, Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Negro Spiritualsappeared in the June 1867 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine in whose pages the work of the Union Army officer and crusading social reformer regularly appeared. A native of Massachusetts, later colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers—an all-black regiment—Higginson was as a young man and remained a deeply committed and passionate advocate for equal treatment for all Americans, a philosophy not held then even by many among the leading lights of the national emancipation movement, Abraham Lincoln not least among them. As such, Higginson believed in the righteousness of extra-legal means to subvert laws he believed to be moral evils. His role in an attempt to free a captured fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, led to ...
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