San Antonio College Library

This is the first examination of the background and meaning of the best known Negro Spirituals. A consideration of their texts shows the spirituals to be songs of faith, deeply rooted in affirmations and experiences from the Bible. Examining over twenty spirituals, the author shows how the early singers shaped and reshaped their biblical texts in the light of the Afro-American backgrounds out of which the songs emerged and the slavery situation in...

"'The songs of a slave are word-pictures of every thing he sees, or hears, or feels.'--John Dixon Long, a Philadelphia clergyman, 1857. The cacophony of clanking chains intruded upon the euphony of human song during the "Middle Passage" when--at the behest of ships' officers--slaves being transported to the Americas caused the overcrowded ships to echo with the sounds of dancing feet and harmonious voices. That scene is one of the first which Dena...

In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. Hearing their singing during her stay, she determined to preserve as much of the music as she could. By the fall of 1862 she managed to have published the first serious musical arrangements...