SPIRITUALS: The Roots of Gospel Music

"Hold On" (Track #7) and "I'm Determined" (Track #2) are two songs that represent the "spirituals" genre. Spirituals are considered to be a mixture of many different African styles (since slaves came from various places in Africa) and the religious songs of the white South. The result of this mixing is one of the earlier examples of folk music indigenous to the U.S.

Elements that African music and American Black spirituals have in common include syncopation, the pentatonic scale, a call-and-response format and similar rhythmic structure.

Audio clip: "I'm Determined" (Track #2)

Spirituals played an invaluable role in slaves' survival. Not only did the songs give them hope, faith and courage in the face of deprivation and barbarity, they also enabled slaves to communicate life-saving messages to one another in code.

"When the sun comes back and the first quail calls, follow the drinking gourd . . ." This line from a spiritual told an escaping slave when to leave and to follow the Big Dipper as his or her guide to freedom.

Audio clip: "Hold On" (Track #7)

The style of spirituals is almost always short, repetitive lines repeated over and over again. Each song could be sung for as long as half an hour. Some songs could be personalized. For example, "Hold your light, Brother Robert-hold your light. Hold your light on Canaan's shore." Each person's name would be substituted for "Robert" until all had been included and personally encouraged.

Though short, these songs were not shallow. They portrayed meaningful truths about God through powerful scriptural images. People who were not credited for their intellectual power and were most often kept illiterate translated Biblical stories into such classic spirituals as, "Joshua Fit [Fought] the Battle of Jericho" and "Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones" (from Ezekiel).

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the White colonel of the first U.S. regiment of African-Americans in 1861, said ". . . history cannot afford to lose this portion of its record. There is no parallel instance of an oppressed race thus sustained by the religious sentiment alone."

The Fisk Jubilee Singers, from Fisk University (a historically Black college), are credited with bringing spirituals into the popular mainstream at the end of the 19th century. The group consisted of nine singers from ages 15 to 25. All except one were ex-slaves. They traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad helping this important musical tradition to survive and be passed on to us today.