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Spirituals: White Spirituals
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Recently, many groups have emerged that aim to preserve and actively continue the tradition of spirituals. Some of these groups organize out of the African American community, while others develop outside of that community. Alphonso Brown acts as one of the leaders and members of the Mt. Zion Spiritual Singers, a group that travels around the U.S. singing traditional songs in their traditional fashion (unrehearsed and un-arranged). He identifies himself as being Gullah and sees singing spirituals as continuing the tradition that his ancestors once began. Another spirituals group, one of the first singing groups to appear, was the Society for the preservation of Negro Spirituals. This all white group consisted of upper-class Charlestonians who were raised by Gullah servants.
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The spirituals are essentially religious songs. Early white American Protestants sang the psalms in meter along with the traditional stately hymns of the church. But on the rural frontier religion was more informal, more individualistic and personal, more emotional, and a new kind of vernacular music emerged to reflect the new religious democracy. Called "spiritual songs," the new music was religious in nature but lacked the dignity of conventional hymns. The African American slave songs influenced spiritual songs, so it is not surprising that the name spirituals was given to these religious slave songs when, following the Civil War (1861-1865), they were first recognized as a discrete African American creation.
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Two books that provide an excellent discussion of the spirituals are Lawrence Levine's Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), pp. 30-55, and Albert J. Raboteau's Slave Religion (1978), pp. 243-66. Both authors argue that the spirituals were part of a religious expression that enslaved people used to transcend the narrow limits and dehumanizing effects of slavery. It was through the performance of the spirituals that the individual and the community experienced their God, a God who affirmed their humanity in ways whites did not, and a God who could set them free both spiritually and physically. Those "sacred songs," as Levine calls them, were ... used as secret communication.
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The melodies used in spirituals are sometimes said to have originated in Africa. However, many spirituals are unrelated to African songs. Such spirituals reflect a direct relationship to evangelistic preaching among poor Southern whites that began at a Kentucky camp meeting in 1800. These "revivals" ... encouraged "white spirituals." The blacks' love for song led them to put their feelings into their singing at worship and at work.
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Early on, some historians claimed the spirituals developed from white folk music. George Pullen Jackson's White Spirituals in the Southern Upland: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and "Buckwheat Notes" (The University of North Carolina Press, 1933) is a good example of that line of argument. Books such as John Lovell's Black Song: The Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (Macmillan, 1972) and Miles Mark Fisher's Negro Slave Songs in the United States (Citadel Press, 1978; orig. publ. Cornell University Press, 1953) counter that argument by demonstrating that black spirituals were not simply black copies of white folk music.
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Inform students that spirituals arose in the early 19th century among African American slaves who had been denied the opportunity to practice traditional African religions for more than a generation and had adopted Christianity. For the most part, slaves were prohibited from forming their own congregations, for fear that they would plot rebellion if allowed to meet on their own. Nonetheless, slaves throughout the South organized what has been called an "invisible institution" by meeting secretly, often at night, to worship together. It was at these meetings that preachers developed the rhythmic, engaging style distinctive of African American Christianity, and that worshippers developed the spiritual, mixing African performance traditions with hymns from the white churches.
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White Spirituals