{"id":7836,"date":"2023-10-06T12:53:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-06T17:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/?p=7836"},"modified":"2023-10-06T12:53:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-06T17:53:49","slug":"black-and-white-spirituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/americanmusic\/2023\/10\/06\/black-and-white-spirituals\/","title":{"rendered":"Black AND White Spirituals"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know what a spiritual is, or at least have heard a spiritual being sung. That is because spirituals are identified in many different contexts; religious songs, folk songs, traditional songs, to name a few. When reading George Cullen Jackson\u2019s article titled \u201c<\/span>White and Negro Spirituals (1943),”<\/span><\/i>1 <\/sup><\/a>I was amazed to discover that \u201cthe white people once sang spirituals, and still sing them-some of the very same songs as those sung by the black folk (page 1)\u201d at nearly the same time as each other.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTraced the white man\u2019s tunes back to a still more remote emergence, in the British Isles where possible and in a secular song environment. For I have felt sure that singers in the Old World would be fairly free, in those early times, from the suspicion of having been influenced by the singing of American slaves (page 265).”<\/span>2 <\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

These \u201cOld World\u201d tunes, as he calls them, were transferred from the British Isles to America. However, many of these tunes also transformed into new spirituals with different meanings as before.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Swing low, sweet chariot” Spiritual. This composition was arranged by H.T. Burleigh3<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

Take \u201cSwing Low, Sweet Chariot\u201d3<\/sup><\/a> for example. Jackson\u2019s studies discover that the \u2018Bailiff\u2019s Daughter\u201d pattern linked from the British Isle can be heard in this Black American spiritual. Now this doesn\u2019t mean that anyone is at fault for \u201ccopying\u201d the work\u2019s of other races with context to this scenario. I state this because even though these two tunes have similar structures and characteristics, they also have completely different sounds and meanings.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n