Religious folksongs by African Americans. Along with folktales, spirituals and their
kindred folk-cry-derived genres—worksongs, field hollers, and the blues—form the
bedrock of African American culture. Composed mostly during the period of American
enslavement of the African, spirituals are a synthesis of African and Christian religious
values and symbolism and of African and European musical aesthetics. Characterized
often by an extraordinarily rhythmic lyricism, they have made homes for themselves in
the plantation field as well as in the concert hall.
Spirituals in their thematic aspects tell the story of an embattled people and stand at
the core of traditional African American Christian theology. They function as antidotes to
the distorted Christianity disseminated by the slave masters for the purpose of
indoctrinating the enslaved into submission. Fugitive Harriet Jacobs (alias Linda Brent)
wrote in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) that slaves often reacted to the
hypocritical teachings of the “Christian” slave masters by singing lines like “Ole Satan’s
church is here below; /Up to God’s free church I wish to go.” Spirituals comment on the
chaotic aspects of the slave’s existence and constitute a formidable corrective to slavery’s
chaos.
Spirituals function also to help this new, African-descended people construct a sense
of selftiood. Spirituals propose three distinct localities of refuge where one might find or
forge a new identity: the wilderness, the mountaintop, and the lonesome valley. They
spell out the religious and secular dimensions of conversion, giving specific guidance for
the preservation of the soul.
Placing the spirituals into categories helps demonstrate their range and richness. Nine
useful groupings are:
Lyrics of Sorrow, Alienation, and Desolation. Marked by despair and weariness, this
category emphasizes experiences of unhappiness, abuse, disappointment, longing,
yearning, exile, loss, beleagueredness, and disillusionment with humanity. Songs in this
group reflect the slaves’ identification with the crucified Christ and focus heavily on their
confusion about their loss of birthright, identity, and place in the universal order.
Lyrics of Consolation and Faith. Noted for their arduous attempt to maintain spiritual
wholeness, these songs provide fortification against bewilderment. Uniting joy and
sorrow, hope and despair, these songs testify to the transforming power of the spirit.
Starkly affirming that healing balms do exist, they speak of healing agents available to those who have experienced the insufferable. They address both personal and communal
uplift and express concern and compassion for the tragic circumstances of humanity.
Lyrics of Resistance and Defiance. Defining the slave’s reality as a condition of war,
these songs demonstrate the will of the enslaved not to be overcome by the brutal aspects
of their physical, political, psychological, and social reality. They convey one
fundamental message: Continue to struggle. Emphasizing unity and organization and
marked by dogged determination, their tone is audacious and valiant.
Lyrics of Deliverance. These songs speak of deliverance through means of physical
escape, death, and resurrection. They appeal for release from all forms of obstacles and
victimization and look forward to reunion with persons lost from the community. These
songs proclaim the need for spiritual preparation in order to move to a better life. Much
attention is given to alerting others to opportunities for escape. This category in particular
consists of many songs that are reputed to have been used to signal captives of the
feasibility of running away.
Lyrics of Jubilation and Triumph. Proclaiming the moral reordering of the New World,
the enslaved nurtured and savored the word “jubilee,” making it central to their sacred
and ceremonial consciousness. Almost any form of triumph against the force of slavery
becomes the subject of a spiritual, but, somewhat ironically, these spirituals express a
resistance to stoicism and pessimism in the face of a harsh world. They celebrate
affirmative psychology and spiritual resilience and serve as rituals of invigoration and
exultation.
Lyrics of Judgment and Reckoning. These songs focus on the disharmony in the world
and on the fact that correction or justice is needed. They refuse to accept that life in its
present form is the norm of existence. Retribution will be meted out to this unnatural
ordering. The time for the Reckoning Day seems well overdue, but each individual, free
and slave, must stand ready to his or her moral account at the bar of judgment.
Lyrics of Regeneration. Confronted with constant attempts to render them degenerate, the
captives created many songs about how to keep themselves charged with the life force.
Thus, there are numerous songs about the electrifying, invigorating, and purifying
baptism rituals.
Lyrics of Spiritual Progress. This category of songs dwells on the migratory experience
of the human to a greater realm of existence. The progress of the soul is achieved by
degrees. One must learn to interpret the signs along the way. True movement begins with
humility, faith, steadfastness, and honest confession. The personal journey may be lonely;
yet, it has no ultimate meaning without consideration for one’s community.
Lyrics of Transcendence. This category of songs insists on creating a place and time
beyond the historical moment and, indeed, beyond history itself. This transcendent
capability reveals the vanity of earthly life by emphasizing that which is not bound by
human definition. These songs show how the enslaved often merged the future with the
present to create for themselves a sense of inner peace regarding their sojourn in the
American wilderness.
Seen from the perspective of their formal aspects, both utilitarian and aesthetic
dimensions are dominant in the spirituals. Thus, they can be called the sacred vernacular
poetry of the African American experience. Sophisticated, though not erudite, in their
employment of structural and semantic features, the spirituals demonstrate the American
musical genius at its best. Essentially choral in origin (as opposed to solo), the musical style features unique breaks, syllabic quavers, off-tones and tone glides, and rare
balancing and manipulation of principles of melody, rhythm, and harmony.
In their adept mixing of naiveté, dignity, and sophistication—qualities of the tragic
and the epic—the semantics of the spirituals run the gamut from the magnificently
simple, to the ambiguous, to the utterly confounding. As a result, the spirituals establish
themselves as a prototypic layering from which later modes of African American musical
and poetic arts could expand.
More specifically, the spirituals utilize a number of stylistic and rhetorical features.
One is an assertion or reaction to a philosophical truth, often made emphatic by
beginning the song with the chorus (For example, “Oh, the land I am bound for, /Sweet
Canaan’s happy land/I am bound for”). Another is clear, sharp phrasing through the
vigorous use of Anglo-Saxon words (for example, “I looked over Jordan/And what did I
see/Coming for to carry me home?”).
Spirituals also employ maximal exploitation of repetition via individual words,
refrains, and choruses (“I’m going to tell you about the coming of the Savior; /Fare you
well, fare you well. / I’m going to tell you about the coming of the Savior; /Fare you well,
fare you well. /There’s a better day a-coming, /Fare you well, fareyouwell”).
There is a predominance of familial and communal pronouns (“I met my mother the
other day, /I gave her my right hand, /…I met my brother the other day; /I met my deacon
the other day; /I met my elder the other day, /I gave him my right hand, /And jus’ as soon
as ever my back was turned, / He scandalize’ my name….”); a partiality toward call-andresponse prompted by emphatic use of the vocative (a call or appeal) (“Mammy, is massa
going to sell us tomorrow? /Yes, yes, yes! /Mammy, is massa going to sell us tomorrow?
/Yes, yes, yes!”).
Spirituals also make use of the easy interchange of phrases, verses, and stanzas. Thus,
segments of one song may float easily into another song, as with the blues. Spirituals also
feature the pervasive use of iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter, a variable
but rudimentary beat or rhythm, and the predominance of the abcb rhyme scheme.
Frequent use is made of the listener as a creative device (“Believer, O, shall I die? /O,
my army, shall I die? /Jesus died, shall I die? /Died on the cross, shall I die?”), of figures
of speech (“My brother sittin’ on the tree of life, /And he heard when Jordan roll”), and
of the antiphonal structure, in which the verse and the refrain are sung alternately (“I have
a leader over there, /I have a leader over there, /I have a leader over there. /Play on your
harp, little David, /Play on your harp, little David, /Play on your harp, little David. /I have
a Savior over there, /I have a Savior over there, /I have a Savior over there. /Play on your
harp, little David, /Play on your harp little David, /Play on your harp, little David”).
The meaning of the spirituals has been disputed by some who claim that the songs
have no political intent, only a religious one, and others have argued that people of
African and African-descended cultures were incapable of producing such artistic
treasures, claiming, therefore, that the spirituals are grounded in European culture and are
derived mainly from the so-cailed “White spirituals.”
Erskine Peters
References
Allen, William Francis, et al. 1971. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: Books for
Libraries.
Cone, James. 1972. The Spirituals and the Blues. New York: Seabury.
Courlander, Harold. 1963. Negro Folk Music U.S.A. New York: Columbia University Press.
Epstein, Dena J. 1977. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
James, Willis Laurence. 1955. The Romance of the Negro Folk Cry in America. Phylon 1:24–25.
Johnson, James Weldon. 1969. The Book of American Negro Spirituals. New York: Viking, pp. 19–
30.
Krehbiel, Henry Edward. 1968. Afro—American Folksongs. New York: Frederick Ungar.
Lovell, James. 1972. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. New York: Collier-Macmillan, pp.
204–214.
Peters, Erskine. 1993. Lyrics of theAjro-AmericanSpiritual. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Southern, Eileen. 1971. The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: W.W.Norton.