A History of the African-American Spiritual

How the African-American Spiritual has maintained its integrity
in the face of major social and musical challenges

[Based on an article by Thomas Lloyd published in the August 2004 issue of the Choral Journal of the American Choral Directors Association; all rights reserved.]

2. The Sound of the Spirituals in Their Original Context

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The first known recording of black spirituals is a Columbia cylinder of the Standard Quartette singing Keep Movin’, recorded in 1894 in Washington, DC.

This track and the first disc recordings of the spiritual, which include five Victor tracks of the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet made in New York in 1902, are among a large number of digitally restored historic recordings now available on the Document Records label[1]. Unfortunately, the invention of Edison’s tin-foil cylinder phonograph in 1877 and Berliner’s gramophone disc recorder in 1887 came too late to record the spirituals as they were sung by the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, not to mention the slaves who first sang these songs at camp-meeting revivals, while working in the fields, or at clandestine church meetings.[2]

However, modern-day descendents of the slave communities of the relatively remote Sea Islands chain of islands lining the east coast from Maryland to Florida have used their relative isolation to sustain older traditions that are thought to retain clear elements of nineteenth Century slave culture from its African roots. Folklorists Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle recorded these traditions beginning in 1935, including spirituals and “ring shouts” (a tradition with strong African roots, where dancers would move in a circle while singers surrounded them with song, often accompanied by rhythmic clapping)[3].

These ring shout sessions that would often take place after late night worship services, could carry on for hours, late into the night, with some songs starting slowly, and then gradually increasing in tempo until the gathering was roused into a frenzy[4]. Other kinds of spirituals could be sung slowly, and drawn out with great feeling. One of the early accounts of spirituals sung in their original context comes from the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, recalling his days as a slave child on the plantation:

[The spirituals] told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep, they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains….[I] did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs[5].

From these and other contemporary sources, several elements of the original performance style of the spirituals can be deduced:

  • Everyone who gathered together participated in the singing, sometimes at post-worship meetings with hundreds at a time -- there was no passive audience;

  • The singing was improvisatory in nature, with words and music passed on and embellished through an oral tradition; this method was often facilitated by the “call” of a strong lead singer and the “response” of those gathered;

  • The singing was vigorous. It “would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs” with a range of vocal color from “speech-like sounds” to “screaming and yelling;”[6]

  • The musical texture can best be described as “heterophony,” i.e.; rarely were the songs sung purely in unison or with the independence of individual polyphonic voices, but there was also no clear harmonic or rhythmic uniformity: the lead voice carried the melody while other voices harmonized more or less freely underneath, within traditional patterns.[7]

For a video of a modern-day performance of ring-shout music by the McIntosh Country Shouters, see:

Musical Examples:

2.  "Keep Movin'," Standard Quartette (H.C. Williams, Ed DeMoss, R.L.Scott, William Cottrell), original 1894, Columbia (cylinder); re-issued on The Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets -- 1894-1928. Document Records: DOCD-5061.

3.  "Blow, Gabriel," McIntosh County Shouters, Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia. Smithsonian/Folkways F-4344 (1983).

Notes:

[1]The Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets -- 1894-1928. Document Records: DOCD-5061. For a complete catalogue listing of Document’s historic re-issues, see (recordings of spirituals are found in the 5000 series).

[2]Eileen Southern notes that while the slaves were often forbidden from gathering independently for church services out of fear of fomenting rebellions, their masters usually preferred to hear them singing in the fields as a way to know that they were working, and to track how far along they had progressed. (The Music of Black Americans -- A History, Third Edition. (New York: W.W.Norton, 1997) 161). She also remarks that many whites chose to interpret the singing of the slaves as a sign of contentment with their condition (Ibid., 177).

[3]Among the numerous recordings of Sea Island singing are Southern Journey, Vol. 12 -- Georgia Sea Islands -- Biblical Songs and Spirituals (Rounder, CD 1712), The McIntosh County Shouters -- Slave Shout Songs from the Coast of Georgia (Smithsonian/Folkways, CD FE 4344), Been in the Storm So Long -- Spirituals, Folk Tales and Children’s Games from John’s Island, South Carolina (Smithsonian/Folkways SF 40031). More recently, Bernice Johnson Reagon has recorded the congregational singing of current churches who still remain tied to these earlier ways of singing: Wade in the Water, Volume II, African-American Congregational Singing (Smithsonian/Folkways, CD SF40073).

[4]Southern 181-2.

[5]Frederick F. Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 58 (quoted by Cruz, Culture, 23). For a detailed study of the ante-bellum origins of the black spiritual, see Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals -- Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

[6]Southern 201-3.

[7]Southern 198.