Performance Practice (Continued)

Other names for this type of singing include "Dr. Watts," "raise a hymn," "old one-hundreds," and the "old way of singing" (Dargan 2006, 26). In another seminal study, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), Lawrence Levine has noted that "the overriding antiphonal structure of the spirituals … placed the individual in continual dialogue with his [sic] community, allowing him at one and the same time to preserve his voice as a distinct entity and to blend it with those of his fellows" (Levine 1977, 33).

Folk spirituals were typically accompanied only by handclaps and foot stomps, which complement the singing with a percussive timbral quality reminiscent of drumming. Bans on the use of loud musical instruments, especially drums, which could be used as signaling devices, did not succeed in eliminating the percussive dimension so highly valued in African music. Contemporary performances of spirituals by such groups as the McIntosh Shouters of the Georgia Sea Islands in which a broomstick is struck against a hardwood floor to replicate the sound of the drums are undocumented in nineteenth-century accounts (Rosenbaum and Buis 1998, 31).

In African American worship contexts, evidence suggests that creation and performance were inextricably connected. Levine brings together several graphic accounts of singing, some from the nineteenth century and some illustrating a continuity of practice in the South into the twentieth century, in which short phrases and exclamations, thrown back and forth by individuals and groups, engender what one observer calls a "creative thrill" (Levine 1977, 26). Another describes how, after one person at a prayer meeting calls out "Git right-sodger":