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Overview

Booker T. Washington took the time to pen the following words: "The plantation songs known as

are the spontaneous outburst of intense religious fervor. They breathe a child-like faith in a personal Father, and glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land of freedom. In singing of a deliverance which they believed would surely come, with bodies swaying, with the enthusiasm born of a common experience and of a common hope, they lost sight for the moment of the auction block, of the separation of mother and child, of sister and brother. There is in the plantation songs a pathos and a beauty that appeals to a wide range of tastes, and their harmony makes abiding impression upon persons of the highest culture. The music of these songs goes to the heart because it comes from the heart" (Darden 2004, 70).

Be ready to:

Identify how spirituals integrate the use of biblical language.

Describe/identify how the use of the world of nature impacts the textual message of the spiritual.

Describe the slaves' personal experience of the spiritual.

Determine the African heritage seen in the Election Day festivities.

Identify the African heritage seen in the Pinkster Day Celebration

Describe the African heritage seen in the music, dances, and instruments in Congo Square, New Orleans.

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Spirituals: Personal Religious Testimony and Experience

Few songs of the Nativity narratives from any era or culture have the gentle, sweet-spirit magic of lines like "Mary, what you goin' to name that pretty little Baby?" This compelling merging of the sacred and the profane, of spirit and ﬂesh, is one of the spiritual's most endearing qualities. "Such intimacy between man and God is extraordinarily pronounced in Negro spirituals compared with other folk songs," notes Ames. "No doubt this is partly explained by the slaves' extreme sufferings, but it must also have had its origins in Africa where relations with supernatural beings are personal and intimate. In West African religions today, the spirit world overlaps with the human world, and gods, ancestors, and other spirits are close at hand all the time. So they are also in the spirituals . . ." (Ames 1955, 133). Slaves were able to achieve this because they separated the gold from the rubbish in Christianity. The slave composers quickly identiﬁed with the "real" Jesus Christ in the Gospels of the New Testament, not the Jesus described in the sermons of White preachers. African American slave Christianity was built on a compassionate and suffering Jesus,

. . . a promulgator of freedom and peace and opportunity, a son of an omnipotent Father. Christ and his Father had proved themselves. They had brought justice out of many impossible situations and could and would bring it bold out of slavery when the time came. They were already bringing it out, to some extent, since they were guiding so many Black people [runaways] to the realms of freedom.

(Lovell 1972, 189)

This empathy with King Jesus created some of the greatest spirituals, those depicting the Cruciﬁxion. To African Americans, to be unjustly accused and nonchalantly murdered was an all-too-regular occurrence:

They Crucified My Lord

Those cruel people! Those cruel people!
Those cruel people! Those cruel people!
Hammering! Hammering! Hammering!
They cruciﬁed my Lord, They cruciﬁed my
Lord, They cruciﬁed my Lord.
They nailed him to the tree, They nailed him
to the tree, They nailed him to the tree.
You hear the hammers ringing, You hear
the hammers ringing,
You hear the hammers ringing.
The blood came trickling down,
The blood came trickling down, The blood
came trickling down

(Work 1940, 100)

Another spiritual that resonated with slaves was the curious "He Never Said a Mumblin' Word." Although the four gospel accounts report that Christ did speak at different times during His trial and cruciﬁxion, the slave composers instead chose to emphasize His silence:

He Never Said a Mumblin' Word

They led Him to Pilate's bar

Not a word, not a word, not a word.
They led Him to Pilate's bar

Not a word, not a word, not a word
They led Him to Pilate's bar

But He never said a mumblin' word, Not
a word, not a word, not a word

(Work 1940, 103)

But it is perhaps in "Were You There When They Cruciﬁed My Lord?♫" that the spiritual ﬁnds its most remarkable expression on this subject:

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

Were you there when they cruciﬁed my Lord?
Were you there when they cruciﬁed my Lord?
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,
tremble
Were you there when they cruciﬁed my Lord?

Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble,
tremble
Were you there when they nailed Him to the tree?

(Work 1940, 103)

There are several reasons for the power of this spiritual. Christa K. Dixon notes that while the biblical account never refers to the Roman cross as a "tree," the tree image must have had a chilling psychic connection for slaves who had seen friends and family members hung and lynched in trees (Dixon 1976, 70). That connection endured for their children and children's children in the South of Jim Crow through the late 1960s.

"Were You There When They Cruciﬁed My Lord?♫" is a vivid example of another reason why the spirituals are singular in their power: they convey a sense of the immediacy of the event. The narrator is there, witnessing this horrific event in real-time. Some of the greatest spirituals have a ﬁrst-person, present-tense urgency that makes them compelling hundreds of years later SIDE NOTEEven now, when one considers the horrific video lasting 8 minutes and 46 seconds revealing George Floyd's death while the three officers just stood by, one cannot help but think, "were you there?" From the outpouring of not only the African American community but the whole world, it caused many to tremble!.

Booker T. Washington

The plantation songs known as "Spirituals" are the spontaneous outburst of intense religious fervor. They breathe a child-like faith in a personal Father, and glow with the hope that the children of bondage will ultimately pass out of the wilderness of slavery into the land of freedom.

Go Down, Moses

Dark and thorny is de pathway
Where de pilgrim makes his ways;
But beyond dis vale of sorrow
Lie de ﬁelds of endless days.