Black gospel music, often called gospel music, is the traditional music of the Black diaspora in the United States.
Black gospel music has been traditionally concerned with the African-American quest for freedom.
Black gospel music has roots in the Black oral tradition-the passing down of history via the spoken word rather than in writing.
Useful in the fields and in the church house, Negro spirituals were the earliest form of Black gospel.
In 1867, a compendium of slave songs titled Slaves Songs of the United States was issued by a group of Northern abolitionists.
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An early reference to the term "gospel song" appeared in Philip Bliss' 1874 songbook, Gospel Songs.
A Choice Collection of Hymns and Tunes, describing songs that were easy to grasp and more easily singable than the traditional church hymns, not unlike Watts' works from a century prior.
This increasingly interracial tradition would eventually morph into the larger Pentecostal movement, which began in a markedly interracial fashion in Los Angeles and helped Black gospel expand nationwide across racial boundaries.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe would emerge from the Black Pentecostal tradition as the first notable gospel recording artist.
The true roots of African American gospel music lie in the American South of the 19th century.
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Spirituals emerged when slaves held informal gatherings together and improvised folk songs.
With echoes of biblical stories and the teachings of Jesus Christ, spirituals told the harrowing story of American slavery with call-and-response counterpoint and freeform rhythm.
African American spirituals have long had special meaning in my personal and professional life.
My awareness of their significance, however, came relatively late.
Yet my introduction to the African American spirituals came to stand at the very heart of this cultural and spiritual awakening for me.
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As I began to sing these songs, deeply rooted in both the Bible and the tragedy of slavery, I came to understand their profound meaning.
The American Negro Spirituals are the folk songs created by the enslaved Africans after their arrival in North America between 1619 and 1860.
The songs created and sung by enslaved women, men and children were born in North America and recant with dignity, resolve and sometimes joy, their stories of life, death, faith, hope, escape, and survival.
These melodies and stories have been passed down orally from generation to generation in the plantation fields, in churches and in camp meetings and have presently taken their places on concert hall stages and recital series around the world.
Born out of the oppressions of slavery, the spiritual is a folk song created by Africans forcibly brought to America and enslaved for 250 years.
Spirituals were created through the combination of African melodies, rhythms, and performance practices with the influences of European Christian Hymnody.
They contain themes of suffering, hope, rebellion, and longing.
They tell the story of Africans in America through song and became the catalyst through which all “American Music” was born.
In Reclaiming the Spirituals, I argue that these songs offer numerous creative approaches to teaching not only the biblical text but also African American Christian heritage.
In fact, the spirituals embody various educational elements (e.g., dialogue, imagination, spontaneity, rhythm, narrative, nature, and ritual) that can enhance the overall educational experience.
I have seen this at work in local church settings where spirituals embodying biblical narratives are used to reenact the stories of biblical heroes and heroines.
African American spirituals not only appropriated the tools of the enslaver’s language to resist slavery, but also relied upon African American folk culture to critique the Southern slave system.
Spirituals challenged a system of power by speaking with the authority of Christian righteousness to call attention to slavery’s shameful and dehumanizing conduct in the eyes of God.
The spiritual “My God Is A Rock In A Weary Land” is illustrative of this dialectical structure.
As a narrative, this spiritual is individuated and serves as a site of memory and subjectivity.
The creation of spirituals thus served as an act of cultural agency rather than cultural containment, embodying a powerful version of the “doublespeak” that Henry Louis Gates discussed in The Signifying Monkey.
This “doublespeak” does not depend upon linguistic and rhetorical double meaning, but upon a discourse of sound and tone that can simultaneously critique linguistic meaning and act separate from it.
Regional demographics and linguistic development provide insight into the development of spirituals.
At the time of the 1800 census, ninety percent of the African American population was concentrated in the southeastern region of the United States.
According to scholar Felicia Barber, three major languages and/or dialects were commonly spoken among African Americans: 1) Louisiana Creole; 2) Gullah/Geechee languages; and 3) African American English (AAE) dialect.
These three languages/dialects appear in published African American spirituals such as Slave Songs of the United States (1867), the earliest publication of spirituals.
The essays of James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) have been a key resource for the performance of spirituals.
As an author, journalist, poet, educator, songwriter, lawyer, politician, and early civil rights leader, Johnson’s interpretations of African American spiritual traditions have served to aid performers, arrangers, and educators over the past century.
Johnson’s essays addressed many musical considerations, including spiritual types, swing, harmony or unison, melody, feeling, rhythm, and interpretation.
Spirituals are what W.E.B.
Du Bois called “sorrow songs” that force people into the spirit and flesh of oral expression.
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope-a faith in the ultimate justice of things.
African Americans Singing Spirituals.
African American gospel music saw a dramatic shift in the late 19th century following the abolishment of slavery, due in large part to the rise of free and open Christian churches that served black congregations.
Spirituals took on new musical forms and developed more energetic, up-tempo sounds - early notes of rhythm and blues.
Pentecostal churches, in particular, embraced music as integral to their expression of faith.
They adopted the belief of The Bible’s Psalm 150: “Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.”
Choirs introduced organs, tambourines and string and brass instruments into their services, and music was woven directly into preachers’ sermons.
The Rise of Gospel Music in the Early 20th Century
While gospel music first developed in urban black churches in the North, its roots lay in the rural South.
Following the Civil War, African Americans migrating from the South brought their musical traditions to Northern cities, where the urban environment gave rise to a new kind of worship music, the gospel song.
In contrast to spirituals, which were improvisatory folk songs passed down orally, gospel songs were composed, formally structured tunes that incorporated elements of popular music and blues.
