LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Spirituals: Negro Spirituals
built 614 days ago
Spirituals are a spontaneous outpouring in music of the Negro slave’s deep religious faith. This devotedness did not blind him to his wrongs, and many slave uprisings occurred in the two decades preceding the Civil War. But the slave’s faith clarified for him the paradox of “man’s inhumanity to man” without lessening his confidence in God and ultimate justice. Therefore, the Negro sang of a celestial home where at last he would have his rightful place as a free being. He studded the spirituals with poetical allusions whose simplicity and imagery have made them classic gems. In the Psalms of Israel, you will find the only counterpart of the spirituals, for the former were ... creations of a people with exalted belief in their possession of great religious truth.
Source:
On their 2005 full-length album Spirituals, Flanger have redirected their launch into outer space into a leap off the deep end. According to their label's website: "[T]he fourth Flanger album is all about re-imagining a period when music was still playful in itself -- because back then, there was just no reason to be too serious about it. Back then, people would come to call their songs Spirituals, for their inspiration to sing and play them came from above and would leave them in high spirits. Which was all the more reason to sing and play their songs." And playful it is, but instead of what Americans may think of as "Negro spirituals," traditionally a blues or gospel lament, these "spirituals" evoke the glory days of ballroom jazz and blues from Duke Ellington to Louis Armstrong to Bessie Smith to Django Reinhardt. And this is the first Flanger album to prominently feature vocals, in this case on nearly every track, courtesy of crooner Riff Pike III, coming off like the bastard son of Jamie Lidell and Freddie Mercury. In fact, one has to wonder if the vocals on this album aren't inspired as much by '20s and '30s jazz as they are by Lidell's concurrent take on soul and R&B vocals on his Multiply release of the same year.
Source:
These Spirituals gave the slaves an identity which appearances seemed to belie: that of a people chosen by the Lord. Just as the Lord fought for Moses and the Israelites, just as he toppled Goliath before David, just as he appeared to Jacob on the ladder, so would he work in their lives. And if they were not delivered while yet living in this world, there remained freedom in the heavenly Canaan. Their songs summarized these beliefs, expressing in broken words the genuine spiritual realities of a world unseen, the world of Christian virtues: forgiveness, hope, faith, love, endurance, eternal life, holiness. James Weldon Johnson noted this and commented, "The Negro took complete refuge in Christianity, and the Spirituals were literally forged of sorrow in the heat of religious fervor. They exhibited... a reversion to the simple principles of primitive, communal Christianity." No wonder blacks, however weary after a hard day's work, risked the sometimes cruel anger of masters to steal into the woods at night and improvise music for hours.
Source:
Following the Civil War, the performance of spirituals for concert stage burgeoned, with the establishment of choruses, including a choir at Fisk University in 1867. The Fisk Jubilee Singers became the most renowned university choral group in the country; yet Fisk was in the company of several other eminent university choirs including those at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. Esteemed arranger, composer, director, and conductor William Levi Dawson would lead the Tuskegee Choir to fame in the 1930s and 1940s. Spirituals held a particularly prominent place in the black cultural and political renaissance of the late 1920s, and in the political ideologies of James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke. For Locke, the leading intellectual of the New Negro movement, the renaissance of the spirituals represented African Americans' newfound rejection of tyranny and disavowal of shame. Johnson and Locke viewed the spirituals and their composers as emblems of progress, of a new philosophy of public representation that radically departed from stereotype and satire.
Source:
In 1904, at the suggestion of the editor of the Musicians’ Library, he transcribed sixteen American Negro spirituals for the piano. In the work, the Negro melodies were treated in an artistic form for the first time. A member of the Jubilee Singers, Frederick Loudin, first taught Samuel to appreciate Negro folk music. Until this period, spirituals had been considered essentially for group singing. There was nothing in the published versions of them then to qualify these songs for solo singing with a piano accompaniment or to inspire singers to make use of them. In fact, spirituals were inaccurately termed Negro “gospel hymns” by most Americans.
Source:
This includes: the history of spirituals, the role it played in slavery and the Christian beliefs of slaves, the post-Civil War use of spirituals in choral anthems and solo vocal concert music, and its importance to the American Civil Rights Movement. Posters to the list may not only raise issues and questions, but they may announce upcoming events, newly released publications and recordings, etc. related to Negro Spirituals.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Negro Spirituals