Negro Spirituals

Negro spirituals — also called African American spirituals — are sacred folk songs created by enslaved and recently emancipated African Americans, drawing on biblical narrative, Protestant hymn texts and the call-and-response structure inherited from West African song. The music ranges from slow, ornamented sorrow songs to up-tempo 'shout' songs accompanied by foot-stomping and hand-clapping. Many texts use coded double meanings — references to crossing the Jordan or to Moses leading the people out of bondage carried both biblical sense and an immediate plea for freedom. The Fisk Jubilee Singers' concert arrangements from the 1870s formalized the music for choral performance and concert hall, but the underlying oral tradition was congregational and improvisatory.

Spirituals developed across the 18th and 19th centuries on plantations and in segregated Black churches in the American South, fusing African vocal practice with the hymnody of the Great Awakenings. After Emancipation, the Fisk Jubilee Singers of Nashville's Fisk University began a series of fundraising tours in 1871; their international success put the repertoire in front of European royalty and into the Western classical canon, paving the way for concert arrangements by Harry T. Burleigh (who taught the songs to Antonin Dvorak in 1893) and others. The tradition fed directly into 20th-century gospel, into Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson's recital programs, and into the freedom songs of the civil-rights movement.

On a concert arrangement, listen for the harmonic settings — often by Burleigh, John Work or Hall Johnson — that translate the original participatory practice into four-part choral form. On older field recordings (the Lomax collections at the Library of Congress, for instance) the texture is rougher and the call-and-response with the congregation is audible. Coded references — Egypt, Pharaoh, Jordan, Canaan — are essential to the lyrics' double meaning.

Marian Anderson's recordings of 'Deep River' and 'Go Down Moses' are the touchstone for concert arrangements. The Fisk Jubilee Singers' historic 1909 recordings show how the genre first reached a global audience. For the earlier participatory style, look to Alan Lomax's field recordings from the 1930s-40s.

The terminology has shifted over time: 'Negro spirituals' was the standard 20th-century name and remains attached to the historic catalog, but 'African American spirituals' is now the more widely used contemporary term. Antonin Dvorak drew explicitly on spirituals during his New York period; the 'Largo' of his Symphony No. 9 'From the New World' (1893) and the slow movement of his 'American' Quartet quote and respond to the idiom.