Negro Spirituals Essay Example

another and share their joys, pains and hopes. In rural meetings, thousands slaves were gathered and listened to itinerant preachers, and sang spirituals, for hours. In the late 1700s, they sang the precursors of spirituals, which were called "corn ditties".So, in rural areas, spirituals were sung, mainly outside of churches. In cities, about 1850, the Protestant City-Revival Movement created a new song genre, which was popular; for revival meetings organized by this movement, temporary tents were erected in stadiums, where the attendants could sing. At church, hymns and psalms were sung during services. Some of them were transformed into songs of a typical African American form: they are "Dr Watts". The lyrics of negro spirituals were tightly linked with the lives of their authors: slaves. While work songs dealt only with their daily life, spirituals were inspired by the message of Jesus Christ and his Good News (Gospel) of the Bible, "You can be saved". They are different from hymns and psalms, because they were a way of sharing the hard condition of being a slave. Many slaves in town and in plantations tried to run to a "free country", that they called "my home" or "Sweet Canaan, the Promised Land". This country was on the Northern side of Ohio River, that they called "Jordan". Some negro spirituals refer to the Underground Railroad, an organization for helping slaves to run away.

The Spirituals are spiritual. Conscious artistry and popular conception alike should never rob them of this heritage, untrue to their tradition and to the folk genius to give them another tone. That they are vulnerable of both crude and refined secularization is no excuse. Even

though their own makers worked them up from the "shout" and the rhythmic elements of the sensuous dance, in their finished form and basic emotional effect all of these elements were completely sublimated in the sincere intensities of religious seriousness. To call them Spirituals and treat them otherwise is a travesty. Emotionally, African slave songs were far from simple. They are not only spread over the whole length of human moods, with the traditional religious overtone skillfully insinuated in each instance, but there is further a sudden change of mood in the single song, baffling to formal classification. Emotional themes relate these songs to the folk activities that they motivated, classifying them by their respective song-types. From this point of view we have essentially four classes, the almost ritualistic prayer songs or pure Spirituals, the freer and more unrestrained evangelical "shouts" or camp-meeting songs, the folk ballads so overlaid.