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Conclusion


When Africans were transplanted from their African home to America, they brought with them a total cultural synthesis in which music played a vital role from the birth of a child to the existence beyond the grave. Their arrival to the shores of their new home did not deter them from using the musical skills that many surely had.

In their songs, they made an oral document of the experience of being subjected, against their will, to adapt to a new home. Though they did not at first write them down, many of those songs were later collected and published so that later generations could learn some of the history of Black people's plight during slavery.

According to Lovell (Lovell 1986, 198), the purpose of the African American spiritual is simply to:

  1. Give the community a true, valid, and useful song.
  2.  Keep the community invigorated.
  3.  Enable the group to face its problems.
  4.  Comment on the slave situation.
  5. Stir each member to personal solutions and to a sense of belonging amid a confusing and terrifying world.
  6. Provide a code language for emergency use.

The characteristics of these folk spirituals reveal musical traits that African Americans had never forgotten from their motherland. The use of polyrhythm, antiphony, repetition of short phrases, part singing incremental lines, incremental repetition, and syncopation were all devices that enslaved Africans were familiar with, although they might not have called them by those names. From the time that the African folk community began to use these musical traits in the spontaneous development of spirituals, historical documents reveal the profound impact that these devices have had on those who have been exposed to them.

Walk Together Children

O, walk together children
Don't you get weary
Walk together children
Don't you get weary
Walk together children
Don't you get weary
There's a great camp meeting in the Promised Land

Steal Away

"Steal away
steal away
steal away to Jesus
Steal away
steal away home
I ain't got long to stay here"