Spirituals, African American

Over the years immigrant groups from across the world have brought their national music to America, but aside from Native Americans, African Americans were the first to create an indigenous American music. The African experience was unique: stolen from their homes, transported involuntarily in chains, and sentenced to lifetimes of slavery, Africans were cut off from their various ethnic cultures and their languages. Their first challenge in America, therefore, was to transcend their different traditions and come together as a single people. During that process an astonishing and still little recognized cultural interchange and transformation took place.

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.

The earliest known mention of a distinctive black religious music, according to scholar Dena J. Epstein, was published in 1819 by John F. Watson, a white man who was criticizing black "excesses" at Methodist camp meeting revivals. Watson's words are revealing:

We have, too, a growing evil in the practice of singing in our places of public and societal worship, merry airs, adapted from old songs, to hymns...most frequently composed and first sung by the illiterate blacks of the society....[At camp meetings] in the blacks' quarter, the colored people get together, and sing for hours together, short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges, or prayers, lengthened out with long repetitive choruses. These are all sung in the merry-chorus manner of the southern harvest field, or husking frolic method of the slave blacks; and also very like the Indian dances. With every word so sung, they have a sinking on one or other leg of the body alternately, producing an audible sound of the feet at every step and as manifest as the steps of actual Negro dancing in Virginia, etc. If some in the meantime sit, they strike the sounds alternately on each thigh.

Despite its critical stance Watson's description is full of relevant and important information. African Americans may have been segregated at camp meetings but they were present and participating. We can see the process of cultural interaction and blending taking place: as Watson's words "first sung by" suggest, whites picked up both songs and styles from blacks. Whatever the meldings, however, spirituals remained distinctly different from white spiritual songs, and the African retentions and influences are clear: the "long repetitive choruses," the "merry airs," and, most clearly, the elements of African dance in the rhythmic body movements.Watson's comparison of the religious music to harvest and husking songs shows the relationship of spirituals to other slave musical creations such as work songs, love songs, shouts, songs for dancing, and railroad songs. And the reference to "actual Negro dancing" reveals that black dance, with its strong African character, was perceived as distinct from European forms of dance.

In a fascinating aside, Watson even touches on the possibility of Native American influences. Overall, Watson's account tells us that spirituals were well formed by 1819. Of course, we do not know what the black community sang by and for itself when it was not in the presence of whites, but we can assume it was less, rather than more, European.