African American Spiritual Historical Resources

1. Introduction

2. The Sound of the Spirituals in Their Original Context

3. The First Tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

4. Countering the images of black-face minstrelsy

5. The Fisk Jubilee Singers sing for the world

6. The Popularity of Early Recordings of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet

7. Performance Characteristics of the Early Recordings

8. Musical and Social Upheaval in the Jazz Age

9. Harry T. Burleigh and the Solo Spiritual

10. Hall Johnson and the Emergence of Larger Mixed Professional Vocal Ensembles

11. Dawson and the Emergence of Large Mixed Choirs in the Historical Black Colleges

12. The Spiritual as Freedom Song

13. Performing the Spirituals Today

W.E.B.DuBois on the Spiritual, from "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

The Underground Railroad in Bucks County

Lourin Plant Article on Racial Barriers in Classical Vocal Music

Additional Links

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.]

9. Harry T. Burleigh and the Solo Spiritual

The next form in which the spiritual captured the imagination of the concert-going and record-collecting public was that of the solo song accompanied by piano. This form was given birth by Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949), a successful baritone recitalist and composer. As a student at the National Conservatory in New York Burleigh worked closely with the esteemed Antonin Dvorák (1841-1904). Responding to his teacher’s interest in the spiritual, he sang the songs for him for hours on end, inspiring Dvorák to challenge American composers to develop a national style of their own with the spiritual as a foundation.[1] One biographer reported a story that Dvorák changed the famous spiritual-like solo in the slow movement of his "New World Symphony" to be played by English horn instead of clarinet, in order to match the color of Burleigh’s voice.[2] His 1916 publication of the Jubilee Songs of the United States of America was the first published collection of spiritual arrangements for solo voice and piano. By the mid-1920s outstanding black concert singers such as Roland Hayes (1887-1976), Paul Robeson (1898-1976), and Marian Anderson (1902-1993) began to make recordings of the song arrangements of Burleigh and others that met with significant popular success. (Hayes can be heard with the Fisk Jubilee Quartet on second tenor in five tracks recorded by Edison on cylinder in 1911.[3]) The authoritative voices of these great singers gave a much more intensely personal expression to the now familiar spirituals, with the piano giving the harmonization a purely instrumental inflection.

Roland Hayes sings "Go Down, Moses" (1922):

Paul Robeson sings "Balm in Gilead" (1942):

Musical Examples:

11.  "Go Down, Moses," arranged by Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes, tenor, Lawrence Brown, piano, original by Vocalion, 1922; re-issued on 'Brother Can You Spare A Dime' – The Roots Of American Song, Pavilion Records (Pearl) GEMM CD 9484.

12.  "Balm in Gilead," arranged by Harry T. Burleigh, Paul Robeson, bass-baritone, Lawrence Brown, piano, original by Columbia, 1942; re-issued on Paul Robeson – Songs Of Free Men, Sony (Columbia Masterworks Heritage Series) MHK 63223.

You Tube videos of leading soloists:

Notes:

[1]Southern 267-8.

[2]H.C. Colles, "Antonin Dvorák in the New World" in The Musical Times, vol. 82, no. 1180 (1941), referenced by John Clapham in Antonin Dvorák: Musician and Craftsman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1966), p. 90.

[3]Document-Records DOCD-5613, tracks 1-5.