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5 African American Spirituals and Their Legacy

       Lauri ScheyerHunan Normal University

The spirituals created by enslaved African Americans may be the most enduring and influential canon of sung poems produced on North American soil. Their origins can only be hypothesized, but they likely date back to the beginning of the international slave trade, based on reports of kidnapped Africans singing in coffles as they were marched to slave ships. Evidence suggests that these sung poems were performed on American soil for two centuries before being transcribed and collected in the nineteenth century by clergy and abolitionists including Richard Allen, William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, Rev. Marshall W. Taylor, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Although the spirituals are products of American plantation culture and evangelical Christianity, they display ample evidence of African survivals based on the work and communal songs described by European seafarers, explorers, and traders dating back to the fifteenth century.¹ These “Slave Songs of the United States,” as they were called in the seminal collection by Allen et al. (1867), were described by perplexed but fascinated early auditors in contradictory terms: “unforgettable,” “weird,” “wild,” “cheerful,” “sad,” “primitive,” “uncanny,” “barbaric,” “unearthly,” “senseless,” “pathetic,” “monotonous,” and “childlike”.² They are also referred to as slave songs, plantation hymns, anthems, religious folk music, spiritual songs, cabin songs, oral culture, vernacular music, work songs, Negro ballads, folk spirituals and seculars, and jubilees. Their literary value as lyric poetry in English has generally been overlooked while their “difference” as aesthetic and cultural products, as well as their influence on African American religion and music, has been stressed. Although there is a long history in the Western tradition of extolling originality, the spirituals have been more commonly treated with bafflement and even hostility for their perceived strangeness, and their resistance to placement in conventional categories. These uncanny lyrics and haunting melodies were experienced by mystified admirers and hostile detractors alike as something unique unto themselves—recognizable as aesthetic cultural products, yet difficult to place into existing literary, liturgical, sociopolitical, or musical categories.³

      The mysterious and compelling lyrics created by enslaved African Americans are an abiding and unique contribution to the national and global songbook, and central to the body of national and world literature that uses poems as instruments of protest and political action. These poems of diasporic origins likely dating to the seventeenth century are omnipresent in American society, and in many world cultures, especially in the postbellum, modern, and postmodern periods. Yet their provenance has been largely overlooked, and they have been afforded scant sophisticated analysis as lyric poetry. The tremendous originality of the slave songs and their operations as instruments of avant-garde practices have been especially ignored. They have played a dynamic yet often underappreciated role, particularly for their extraordinary inventiveness, in imaginatively inspiring some of the most formally and conceptually innovative poetic products in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

In the nineteenth century, commentators struggled to compare the spirituals—often with the motive of proving that they were derivative and substandard copies—to other bodies of music and literature, including “Scotch and Scandinavian ballads” by Higginson. Musicologists such as George Pullen Jackson, Richard Wallascheck, Newman I. White, Guy B. Johnson, and Edmund S. Lorenz claimed they were influenced by white European Protestant and Methodist hymns as well as Scottish barroom ballads and German school songs. Although theories of white origins persisted, the spirituals were clearly distinctive creations with distinguishing literary, musical, performative, thematic, and structural characteristics. As oral poems, they contain many of the mnemonic devices that allow lyrics to be quickly learned and shared, such as the movable blocks of allusions, references, metaphors, words, phrases, content, and imagery described by William Barton as “mosaics” and by Eileen Southern as “wandering choruses.”⁴ The common practice of lining out, in which a leader sings a line of a hymn that the congregation repeats, would also enable the spirituals to be shared and preserved. These set-pieces allowed for substantial variation and improvisation, providing opportunities for spontaneity juxtaposed with patterned structures, which differentiated these continuously varying oral poems from the unchanging rigidity of canonical textuality and concepts of “correct” or “finished” versions. Their changing performance as oral texts valuing improvisation and creativity surrounding familiar forms and phrases explains why collections contain differing “versions” of the spirituals. The transcriptions made by early auditors were later given formal musical arrangements. The oral “originals”—which themselves were the remembered versions of individual performers—could only be captured long after Emancipation when technology enabled methods of recording performances by formerly enslaved African Americans.

The spirituals’ senses of dynamic immediacy and participant engagement were heightened by syncopation. They were performed with exuberant physicality, including unison dancing, clapping, bodily swaying, spontaneous shouts of jubilation and strong emotional affect, and rhythmic motions. Rather than solely individual acts of poetic exclamation, they were intended as acts of a group, expressed through such devices as antiphony, the call-and-response patterns between changing leaders and participants. Transporting the community’s

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