African American Spiritual

Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade.

Spirituals encompass the “sing songs,” work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word “spirituals” referred to all these subcategories of folk songs.

While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature (but not continuation) of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres emerged from the spirituals song craft.

Famous spirituals include “Swing low, sweet chariot,” composed by a Wallis Willis, and “Deep down in my heart.” The term “spiritual” is derived from the King James Bible translation of Ephesians 5:19: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.” The form has its roots in the informal gatherings of African slaves in “praise houses” and outdoor meetings called “brush arbor meetings,” “bush meetings,” or “camp meetings” in the eighteenth century. At the meetings, participants would sing, chant, dance and sometimes enter ecstatic trances. Spirituals also stem from the “ring shout,” a shuffling circular dance to chanting and handclapping that was common among early plantation slaves. An example of a spiritual sung in this style is “Jesus Leads Me All the Way,” sung by Reverend Goodwin and the Zion Methodist Church congregation and recorded by Henrietta Yurchenco in 1970.

African American Spirituals

—
The Library of Congress

A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s.