Vernacular Forms: The Spiritual

"Negro spirituals are the religious songs sung by African Americans since the earliest days of slavery and first gathered in a book in 1801 by the black church leader Richard Allen. As scholars have observed, this term, whether abbreviated as spirituals or not, is somewhat misleading: for many black slaves, and for their offspring, the divisions between secular and sacred were not as definite as the designation spirituals would suggest. Certainly these religious songs were not sung only in churches or in religious ritual settings. Travelers in the Old South and slaves themselves reported that music about God and the Bible was sung during work time, play time, and rest time as well as on Sundays at praise meetings. As historian Lawrence Levine observed, for slaves, the concept of the sacred signified a strong will to incorporate 'within this world all the elements of the divine'" (Gates 8).

Gates' depiction of the relationship between slaves and religiosity and between slaves and their sorrow songs touches on an important ethnographic aspect of African--and African American cosmologies. Despite the virulence of the European slave trader and the North American plantation owner, West African religious traditions survived through reiterative and performative aspects of slave Christianity. The "Ring Shout" of Gullah communities in the South Carolina coastal region carries elements of Vodu ceremony, as does the "call-and-response" tradition of the early days of the black church. Moreover, like the West African follower of Vodun, the slaves whose sorrow songs spoke of 'flying away home' and of Moses, the messianic representation of deliverance, visualized a spiritual world that regularly interceded upon the real, the actual. Therefore, the spiritual and redemptive were not distant notions: these were very much a part of day-to-day life.

This close interaction with the spiritual endowed slaves to visualize a means to overcome the daily misery of chattel slavery. Their songs, which bespeak their profound sufferings, also locate a communal uplift through shared experience.

Founded in the early 1870s at Fisk University in Tennessee, the Jubilee singers, an a capella vocal group, assembled to raise money for their school. One of their early recordings (1909) of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" recalls the staunch resilience of the early North American slaves.