Black Hymnody

With the church as the center of the Black community, the idiom of gospel music began in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century with Dr. Charles Albert Tindley's hymns A song of praise or adoration to a deity.. Tindley was born to a free mother and an enslaved father. Though he was not formally educated, he taught himself several languages and became a Methodist minister, eventually heading a church in Philadelphia whose membership grew to over three thousand parishioners. He wrote the hymn "I Shall Overcome" that became the inspiration and precursor to the quintessential hymn of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome"♫. His hymns flowed directly out of the reservoir of Negro spirituals A religious song of a kind associated with Black Christians of the southern U.S. and thought to derive from the combination of European hymns and African musical elements by Black slaves., employing the two-part structure of verse and refrain, the trope of call-and-response, and the art of repetition, as practiced by slaves in their invisible churches, praise houses, and various camp meetings.