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Overview

The African American musical genre known as the antebellum folk spiritual assumed an identiﬁable shape sometime after the arrival of African slaves on the North American continent but long before the American Civil War. In her initial analysis of the genre, Maultsby writes: "As a form of religious expression performed primarily in contexts free of White control, antebellum folk spirituals were outside the boundaries of consciousness for the vast majority of the White American public" (Maultsby 2015, 60). Unfortunately, before the advent of audio recordings, researchers can only surmise what these early sounded like by using extant descriptions and a few recordings made decades later in isolated churches throughout the South. Still, what has survived gives us an idea of what the spirituals said and a hint of their music.

Be ready to:

Define the term etymology and use of the term "spiritual" as found in the publications Slave Songs of the United States and Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands.

List at least three types of standard musical (melodic) scales used in the spiritual.

Explain the term heterophony and demonstrate its use with another student.

List the eight characteristics of a spiritual and discuss a selected spiritual focusing on one of the eight spiritual characteristics.

Describe the difference between folk spirituals and arranged spirituals.

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References

The Dissemination of the African American Spiritual in America and Europe: Social and Cultural Relevance

Spirituals began to have a wider audience during the Civil War. During this time, critical historical documents reveal that spirituals started to move outside African American environments and attract a broader following. Though people had been singing spirituals in the South for a long time, it was during and after the Civil War that observers began to pay attention to what they saw and heard (Epstein 1963, 207). Lucy McKim Garrison (1842-77), arguably the first person to have the music of the enslaved Africans reduced to musical notation, arranged and published two songs, "Roll Jordan Roll" SIDE NOTEThe first spiritual to appear in print was the melody for Roll, Jordan, Roll published by Lucy McKim of Philadelphia in 1862. The first collection of these treasures appeared in 1867 under the title Slave Songs of the United States. and "Poor Rosy," in Dwight's Journal of Music on November 1, 1862 (Epstein 1983, 539). According to the printed source, "Roll Jordan Roll" was considered to be "one of the best known and noblest of songs" (Allen 1951, 1).

Carol Brice sings "Roll, Jordan, Roll" [ 00:00-00:00 ]

Lucy McKim Garrison (1842-1877)

Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911)

In August of 1863, Henry George Spaulding, a Unitarian minister and member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War, visited Port Royal in South Carolina Sea Islands during a Navy stopover (Katz 1969, 3). He transcribed the songs heard there for the records of the popular Continental Monthly in an article titled "Under the Palmetto" of the August 1863 issue-pages 196-200 (Southern 1983, 150). The abolitionist, clergyman, author, and army officer Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), who was in command of the First South Carolina Colored Volunteers (Cornish 1956, 88), carefully wrote down the texts of songs he heard his men sing (Southern 1983, 175). Southern states:

It was entirely appropriate that Higginson should have been given such a command. A graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Divinity School, he had left the ministry of a Unitarian Church in Massachusetts after a three-year period to work in the anti-slavery movement. His activities as an abolitionist involved him with the struggles of John Brown, the noted martyr to the cause of abolition. Higginson's fascination with songs sung by the ex-slaves of his regiment led him to write an article on the subject for the Atlantic Monthly, XIX (June 1867)

(Southern 1983, 175)

In 1867, three Northerners, William Francis Allen (1830-99) Charles Pickward Ware (1840-1921), and the aforementioned Lucy McKim Garrison, decided to preserve and augment their collection of songs by the previously enslaved. They, therefore, arranged to have them published in Slave Songs of the United States. According to Lovell, a noted authority on the African American spirituals:

The book of "Slave Songs" and the article by Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in the middle of 1867 aroused a few hundred music lovers, scholars, and general readers. For the great majority of American, even cultured Americans, the Afro-American spiritual was still an unknown quantity. It was not to remain so for very long.

(Lovell 1972, 402)

Down in the Valley

We'll run and never tire
We'll run and never tire
We'll run and never tire
Jesus sets poor sinners free

Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain
cannot be unlived, but if faced with
courage,
need not be lived again.