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Spirituals: White Spirituals
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The black spirituals developed mostly from white rural folk hymnody. (Blacks and whites attended the same camp meetings, for instance, and black performance style possibly counterinfluenced the revival songs.) Many black spirituals ... exist in the white folk music tradition also, and many others have melody analogues in secular white American and British folk music. The borrowing of melodies with pentatonic (five-note) and major scales is especially prominent. In voice quality, vocal effects, and type of rhythmic accompaniment, black spirituals differ markedly from white ones. Black spirituals were sung not only in worship but also as work songs, and the text imagery often reflects concrete tasks.
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George Pullen Jackson’s research in particular progressed along these lines (‘White and Negro Spirituals, Their Life Span and Kinship...’, 1943). Other researchers refused to accept this simplistic (and perhaps racially biased) explanation. Alan Lomax has commented, "no amount of scholarly analysis and discussion can ever make a Negro spiritual sound like a white spiritual."
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Collections and arrangements of spirituals have been made by R. Johnson and J. W. Johnson, R. N. Dett, G. L. White, J. A. Lomax and A. Lomax, R. Hayes, and others. See ... G. P. Jackson, White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (1933) and Spiritual Folk-Songs of Early America (1937); G. P. Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals (1943); L. Jones, Blues People (1963); J. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (1980).
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As early as 1871 the Jubilee Singers from Nashville's Fisk University included spirituals in their concert programs, which served to introduce them to white audiences as well as the international community. It was, in fact, the Jubilee Singers, and later the Hampton Singers, from the Hampton Institute in Virginia, who were the inspiration for such composers as R. Nathaniel Dett, Clarence Cameron White, and Harry T. Burleigh to publish their own arrangements of spiritual melodies.
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Musicologist George Pullen Jackson extended the term to a wider range of folk hymnody, as in his 1938 book White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, but this does not appear to have been widespread usage previously. "Spiritual song" was often used in the white Christian community through the 19th century (and indeed much earlier), but not "spiritual."
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White Spirituals