When later authors allude to the spirituals, which are already alluding to prior literary tradition, the canon grows and perpetuates using ancient devices for highly original purposes of bold self-assertion in dialogue with the cultural power center. We have early and clear proof of the existence of an African American canon in which the spirituals played a key role in inserting African American voices, perspectives, and experiences into literary tradition. The spirituals are a source of citation and allusion in all genres of African American writing and oratory—plays, essays, songs, music, religious texts, fiction—from the nineteenth century to the present. In the genre of poetry, we find the African American tradition suffused with the spirituals’ influence in myriads of ways. There are echoes of structural components of the spirituals, including call-and-response, and devices of repetition, including words, phrases, and refrains. There are direct and indirect citations to the words of specific spirituals. Applications appear of the resonant Old and New Testament stories as used in the spirituals such as Noah’s Ark, climbing Jacob’s ladder, the suffering and crucified Jesus, Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel and the Lion, Ezekiel and the Wheel, Moses and the Exodus, the vision of heavenly battle and reward in Revelation, and travel to the Promised Land. There are global allusions to major themes including retribution on sinners, being good and holy in one’s heart, hypocritical Christians, bonds and reuniting with family and loved ones, serving God, praying for strength and fortitude, and the stony road to freedom.
The spirituals serve as resounding echoes, allusions, and formal models throughout the African American poetry tradition. The prosodic structures of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in “Ethiopia” owe as much or more to the forms and themes of the spirituals as to the conventional prosody of the Anglo-American canon. In “Eliza Harris,” a phrase like “aided by Heaven, she gained a free shore” (st. 7) echoes a major theme of many spirituals such as “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down, Moses.” Harper’s “Songs for the People” (later echoed in “For My People” by Margaret Walker) articulates the central theme of many spirituals that poems are intended to serve as balm for the whole community, especially those who are suffering. We find unmistakable themes of retribution and deliverance as well as the echoic structures of spirituals in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “A Litany of Atlanta” with the vivid imagism of a phrase like “Red was the midnight” evoking “De moon run down in a purple stream” in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” In “When Malindy Sings,” Paul Laurence Dunbar famously alludes to the spirituals as a genre, and directly cites the mosaic phrase (to employ Barton’s useful term) “Come to Jesus”8 and the spiritual “Rock of Ages.” “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home” by Sterling A. Brown similarly alludes to the cultural centrality of the entire genre and uses “When the Saints Go Marching In” as the extended metaphor on which the poem is built. Robert Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” alludes to numerous embedded specific spirituals, themes, and wandering choruses to drive the narrative core of this lyric poem mirroring the way the spirituals themselves conveyed powerful subtextual messages. Hayden’s poem contains citations to “Many Thousand Gone” (“Many thousand rise and go/many thousands crossing over”), “No More Auction Block for Me” (No more auction block for me/no more driver’s lash for me”), “Oh Freedom!” (“And before I’ll be a slave/I’ll be buried in my grave”), “I’m On My Way” (“I’m bound for the freedom, freedom-bound”), the direct address of Ezekiel (“Tell me, Ezekiel”), God’s deliverance (“Jehovah coming to deliver me”), and “Bound for Glory” (“Come ride-a my train”). Margaret Walker’s renowned anthem “For My People” refers in the opening line to “my people” […] “singing their slave songs.” “The Bones of My Father” by Etheridge Knight is a response to “Dry Bones.” “Harriet in the Promised Land” (from the 1938–1940 Harriet Tubman Series by Jacob Lawrence) by Sam Cornish is a global allusion to the spirituals’ heavenly reward imagery and the conditions of their performance (“she kneels/like a slave/in church/like a slave preparing to dance”). In Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” the poem’s major theme and repeated message are delivered through the insistent repetition of “I rise,” including as the closing triplet, which echoes themes and devices that dominate spirituals such as “Oh Freedom!” “Study the Masters” by Lucille Clifton ends “if you had heard her/chanting as she ironed/you would understand form and line,” an homage to anonymous women poets who sang as they worked, which surely applies to the creators of the spirituals.
Fenton Johnson’s collection Visions of the Dusk contains a section of ten poems titled “Negro Spirituals.” “The Lonely Mother (A Negro Spiritual),” “Singing Hallelujia (A Negro Spiritual),” and other examples such as “De Ol’ Home” and “Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn” are explicit global and formal allusions to spirituals. “Keep on Pushing” by David Henderson takes its title and theme from the song by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions which articulates a key concept and wandering chorus of several spirituals, notably “Keep a-Inching Along” and “Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Around.” “Spyrytual” by Russell Atkins is an extended allusion to “Oh Didn’t It Rain” in the form of a visual poem. “Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin’s Spiritual” by Douglas Kearney signifies on “Wade in the Water,” an allusion which is further heightened by Kearney’s performance of the poem as a song. “All God’s Chillun” by Kamau Brathwaite takes its title from the spiritual by that name. A mocking evocation of slavery-era and Jim Crow racism, it signifies on phrases and themes of other spirituals (notably “Go Down, Moses” and “All God’s Chillun”) by turning the tables from prayerful human supplication to God’s failures to protect them from whips, torment, and lynching (“These my children?/God, you hear them?”; “an’ let’s get to hell out’a Pharoah’s land!”). Julie Ezelle Patton’s “When the Saints Go” is a postmodern elegy, tribute, and interleaving of themes and phrases constructively re-purposing the themes and lexical materiality of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Patton’s “Revelation” is a virtual postmodern deconstruction of the apocalyptic themes, phrases, and images that are such strong identifiers of the unique operations of the spirituals.
Perhaps the most famous poem written about the spirituals is “O Black and Unknown Bards” by James Weldon Johnson, which is the epigraph of the Preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (Johnson and Johnson 1925). The poem’s theme is a Romantic meditation in the form of an ode or elegy addressed to the lost and anonymous creators of the spirituals—“O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed”—and the mystical force that inspired them to produce these poems. Its six octaves suggest cantos as music dominates each stanza: “minstrel’s lyre,” “burst into song,” “melody,” “melodic,” “note in music,” “ears,” “reed,” “bars,” “trumpet-call,” “tones,” “singers,” “sang,” “strings,” “chord,” “music empyrean.” The structure is ottava rima using iambic pentameter lines with a slightly differentiating variant in the rhyme scheme from the Byronic pattern, notably minus the double rhyme closing couplet (ababcdcdcd in Johnson’s poem versus the abababcc pattern of Don Juan). Here we have a clear evocation of the canonical Anglo-American poetry tradition, but particularly the Romantic vision of the inspired gifted individual poet whose “lips […] touch the sacred fire of divine poetic transport” (st. 1).
The poets are apostrophized and pluralized into a group in this poem, as we see from the title and as a continuing theme throughout the poem: “O Black and unknown bards of long ago,/How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” (st. 1) The third person plural also used in the title and first stanza (“bards”) is juxtaposed with a singular “he” in both stanzas one and two, where the speaker imagines with increasing vividness the model of this poet-bard. The poem continues the pattern of play with pronouns and referents in the penultimate