During Reconstruction and into the Nadir, both black and white audiences treated the spirituals with ambivalence. For many African Americans, they were painful reminders of the shameful period of slavery best left in the past in order to move forward; for others, they represented an indelible moment in black history that ended in victory and should be preserved. For some white Americans, they were nostalgic vestiges of sentimentalized plantation culture and misled visions of “happily singing” enslaved people; for others, out of virulent racism, the spirituals were products either to mock in minstrel shows or ignore as expressions of African American subjectivity. Their earliest transcriptions were primarily by white auditors, often with self-acknowledged guesswork and the challenges of a limited ability to accurately preserve all of the salient musical and performative qualities, including the multiple and constantly changing versions, variable pitches, sighs, moans, throat turns, hums, blue notes, interjected responses, foot-tapping, dance movements, and pattin’ juba, a mode of percussion created by stomping and slapping the body. The postbellum and early twentieth-century interventions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Fisk University and the Hampton Institute transformed the spirituals into the formal versions known as the concert tradition which reflected European choral practices, and for some audiences, provided evidence of African Americans’ encultured “progress” and “refinement.” R. Nathaniel Dett, Harry T. Burleigh, J. Rosamond Johnson, and William Levi Dawson created some of the most popular concert arrangements. By doing so, however, some of the features that were originally so arresting and peculiar to the early auditors were minimized or erased, while other distinctive qualities of their harmonic, melodic, and literary beauty and power were preserved.
Numbering 6,000 or more, the spirituals are not only the largest body of sung poems in American history, but their past and current influence also may be unsurpassed. They are so deeply engrained in American culture that their provenance as diasporic poems created by kidnapped and enslaved Africans is often overlooked and comes as a surprise. These renowned works are central to the American “folk” songbook and to the body of literary and national allusions; they include “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Kumbaya,” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Go Down Moses,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Let Us Break Bread Together On Our Knees,” “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho,” “Do Lord, Do Lord, Do Remember Me,” “Gimme That Old Time Religion,” “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Many Thousand Gone” (“No More Auction Block For Me”), “Oh, Freedom!,” “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart,” “Rise, Shine, Give God the Glory,” “Rock of Ages,” “There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight,” “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “My Lord What a Mornin’,” “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and “You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley.”
The lyrics of these sung poems have been loved, translated, and treasured internationally, with a continuing flow of new arrangements, recorded and sung in houses of worship of multiple religions and denominations, school recitals, community organizations, choral recitals and orchestral performances, in multiple musical genres from rock to jazz to blues to gospel, and at political and labor rallies, often by crowds that might be startled to discover the creation story of the words they are singing. Because their provenance may be unknown to some who perform and enjoy the spirituals in the twentieth and twenty-first century, they are widely perceived as universal messages of human struggle (“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”), encouragement to persevere (“You’ve Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley”), consolation and joy (“My Lord, What a Morning!”), celebration and jubilation (“Go Tell It on the Mountain!”), hope (“Keep Inching Along”), mourning and consolation (“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”), cheery uplift (“This Little Light of Mine”), exhortations to persevere in times of hardship (“Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Around”), Christian (“Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart”) and ecumenical religious faith (“Rise, Shine, Give God the Glory”), political peace (“Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”), making peace with humankind (“Kumbaya”), or demands for equal respect and treatment (“Oh Freedom!”), often interpreted as metaphorical commentary on the human condition without fully comprehending their specific and horrific instigating circumstances. As anonymous lyrics, their identity is often mistaken: these antebellum creations have been misattributed to early-twentieth-century labor movements and the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.
In addition to the uniqueness of their presentational features, a body of characteristic literary and conceptual themes can be noted in many spirituals. John Wesley Work divided them into songs of joy, sorrow, faith, hope, love, determination, adoration, patience, courage, and humility. R. Nathaniel Dett called them “hymns” with even more precise categorizations of theme: admonition, aspiration, Bible, Jesus Christ and Christianity (resurrection, religious experience, second coming, death of Christ, Christmas, deliverance), holidays and occasions, consolation, death, encouragement, faith and fellowship, future life, invitation, judgment, meditation, occasions, penitence, pilgrimage, praise, and tribulation. Roland Hayes divided spirituals into the large classifications of Old Testament, Old and New Testament, and Life of Christ.5
Several dominant literary operations are also identifiable in many of the spirituals. We often find uncanny imagery, including references to physical enslavement that entail the ability of the spirit or mind to transcend the body. Time was often presented in a suspended and fluid state, with ancestors and biblical figures blending into the present and the future hovering within close reach. Interchangeable segments of lyrics with similar lines, images, phrases, and even whole stanzas recur in multiple songs. Extensive uses of varied patterns of phonic, lexical, phrasal, and referential repetition are often correlated with the call-and-response form. Rhyme schemes are irregular in comparison with the conventions of the Anglo-American canon, more akin to sprung rhyme, and relying heavily on repetition, alliteration, and off-rhyme for echoic and sonic cohesion. The lines and verses are of variable lengths that appear to coordinate with the breath and rhythmic dance movements. Thematic discontinuities or metaphorical and intuitive poetic jumps take place freely within the same spiritual, creating fantastical metaphors and cognitive blends that derive from seemingly discontinuous themes and subjects in the same spiritual. Often such apparent thematic disintegration relates to brilliant uses of hidden messages intended for selective audiences, such as political messages of insurrection and resistance or advice on escape opportunities. The rhythmic patterns, like the rhyming patterns, are sprung, variable, and complex, and driven by orality, musicality, and physicality rather than textuality. We find extensive uses of the call-and-response structure where revolving leaders feed phrases or refrains to the group to repeat either verbatim or more often with inventive responsive variations.
The tone of the songs is often conveyed through satirical humor, sarcasm, allegory, allusion, indirect forms of quotation, veiled insults of playing the dozens and toasts, and signifying. Songs with a veneer of religiosity often veil coded underlying themes and dictions that are both secular and prayerful, such as the stress on themes of slavery and freedom, punitive justice to wrongdoers, payback and retribution, and the hypocrisy of slave-holders. Many examples contain extended development of specific biblical narratives—often those relating to slavery, imprisonment, freedom, heavenly reward, divine intervention, prophetic dreams, good over evil, justice over injustice, and examples of perseverance to overcome greater and malevolent powers. The biblical allusions, frames, and references are often conveyed through direct address of ancestors, biblical figures, heroic models, and spirit guides, which brings together African survivals with Christian belief. The vernacular diction is connected to unusual syntax and inventive lexical formations.
The Western philosophical framework of Cartesian dualism is absent, enabling the mind to be depicted as traveling freely from the body. Satan is often depicted in the form of a trickster figure, a conflation of African survivals and plantation