African American Spiritual Historical Resources

1. Introduction

2. The Sound of the Spirituals in Their Original Context

3. The First Tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers

4. Countering the images of black-face minstrelsy

5. The Fisk Jubilee Singers sing for the world

6. The Popularity of Early Recordings of the Fisk Jubilee Quartet

7. Performance Characteristics of the Early Recordings

8. Musical and Social Upheaval in the Jazz Age

9. Harry T. Burleigh and the Solo Spiritual

10. Hall Johnson and the Emergence of Larger Mixed Professional Vocal Ensembles

11. Dawson and the Emergence of Large Mixed Choirs in the Historical Black Colleges

12. The Spiritual as Freedom Song

13. Performing the Spirituals Today

W.E.B.DuBois on the Spiritual, from "The Souls of Black Folk" (1903)

The Underground Railroad in Bucks County

Lourin Plant Article on Racial Barriers in Classical Vocal Music

Additional Links

Links to additional background on the Spirituals

Ruth Naomi Floyd - Beauty Echoes: The Redemptive Power of African American Spirituals, in The Rabbit Room, August 27, 2024.

Ruth Naomi Floyd - Remembrance, Freedom, and Song, in The Rabbit Room, July 19, 2024.

The concluding paragraph of the above essay: “The enslaved Africans survived the harsh system of slavery, and yet it did not kill their music. In the midst of the darkest time in American history, there was beauty. There was redemption. The prophet Zephaniah tells us that God sings over us with joy. Our singing God took something horrific and made beauty out of it. Beauty was redeemed, and God did it through song.” - Ruth Naomi Floyd

Eileen Guenther - In Their Own Words: Slave Life and the Power of Spirituals, Morningstar Music Publishers, 2016.

Felicia Raphael Marie Barber - A New Perspective for the Use of Dialect in African American Spirituals, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

The Spirituals Database - A searchable database of sound recordings of concert Negro Spirituals for solo voice - An Art of the Negro Spiritual Project

Joe Horowitz blog about the Brevard Project: Orchestras, American roots, and appropriation

Rick Pidcock - “Is there a balm in singing the spirituals, and if so, who should sing them?” A 2021 analysis piece for baptistnews.com on cultural appropriation and the Spirituals, including interviews with Rollo Dilworth and Anton Armstrong.

Kaitlyn Greenidge in the New York Times: Black Spirituals as Poetry and Resistance (March 5, 2021)

Brent Staples - “How Blackface feeds White Supremacy” New York Times, 2019. Staples presents an excellent overview, with illustrations, of the history of Blackface imagery in the United States and the persistence of widespread ignorance of this history.

Joe Carter - On Being: 'The Spirituals with Joe Carter' On Being's Krista Tippett interviews the singer Joe Carter about the origins and meaning of the Spirituals.

A new excavation in Maryland reveals insights into the orgins of "Ezekiel saw de wheel":

      Ezekiel's Wheel Ties African Spiritual Traditions to Christianity

A perceptive essay by cultural critic A. O. Scott in the September 29, 2013 issue of the New York Times:

      ‘Conversation About Race’ Has Not Brought Cultural Consensus  

Excellent interactive web sites from PBS:  

      Slavery and the Making of America (PBS) 

     The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

An important book about what replaced Jim Crow, by scholar Michelle Alexander:

     The New Jim Crow - Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

A discussion with the director, lead actors, and a historian about the new film, 12 Years a Slave:

     An Essentially American Narrative

Preview in the New York Times of a new book documenting the previously hidden close relationship between the Ivy League universities and slavery:

      Ebony and Ivy by Craig Steven Wilder

A radio biography of the composer Florence Beatrice Price:

      Florence Beatrice Price

The PBS documentary The Musical legacy of Roland Hayes