genre american
Spirituals
View in the web ↗18th century–1870s · American South
Sacred songs created by enslaved African Americans — sorrow songs and ring shouts that fused Christian texts with African musical practice, later carried to the world by the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
The spirituals arose where the Christianity preached to enslaved people met the musical practices they had preserved. In the “ring shout” — a counter- clockwise, shuffling sacred dance — and in the camp meetings of the Great Awakenings, Protestant hymns were stretched, bent and answered until they became something new: “Go Down, Moses,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Wade in the Water” (Heilbut 1971; Library of Congress, Songs of America).
W. E. B. Du Bois called them the “sorrow songs,” but they were never only sorrowful. Many spirituals carried double meanings — heaven as freedom, the Jordan as the Ohio River — functioning simultaneously as worship, consolation and coded resistance.
After Emancipation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Fisk University toured the United States and Europe from 1871, performing concert arrangements of the spirituals to raise money for their school. Those tours made the spirituals the first African American music to be celebrated worldwide, and established the repertoire from which twentieth-century gospel would grow.
Connections
Roots, siblings & influences
Sacred and secular branches of the same musical inheritance, often sung by the same people.
Ring shouts, call and response and communal improvisation reshaped Protestant hymns into a new sacred music.
The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times · Songs of America (digital collection)
What grew from it
Gospel reset the spirituals' inheritance in a modern, composed, performed idiom for the urban church.
Sources
- The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times — Anthony Heilbut (1971). Simon & Schuster · Book
- Songs of America (digital collection) ↗ . Library of Congress · Archive