Saturday January 28, 2023
Love of Spirituals
karen Horton
I have always loved singing spirituals. I probably learned my first spiritual by the time I was eight, singing “Kumbaya” around the Girl Scout Camp campfire. I went to church camps where we sang others such as “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” I found them haunting even though I didn’t fully understand what they were about. Only recently, in completing my B.A. Music capstone project on spirituals, did I learn more about the true meanings. Melva W. Costen, at Interdenominational Theological Center, writes “African American Spirituals are songs that were composed and transmitted spontaneously by communities of Africans enslaved in America from about the mid-seventeenth century, to the latter portion of nineteenth century…Spirituals are testimonies of hope, faith and confidence, and proof that their enslaved state was not an invincible position.” I learned that spirituals address the deep yearning of the enslaved people for freedom, and that the words are often coded. Spirituals reflect the poetic, rhythmic, musical, and religious cultures from which the captured Africans were forcibly removed, and the limited Protestant religious training they received in slavery. Spirituals such as Deep River, arranged by H. T. Burleigh, take on new meaning with this understanding: “Deep river, my home is over Jordan, Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground. Oh, don’t you want to go to that gospel feast, That promis’d land where all is peace?” The phrases “over Jordan” and “campground” refer to a place of refuge, such as the north or Africa. The Christian images “gospel feast” and “promised land” hid the true meaning of the words from their masters, encouraging them to think the song was about life after death rather than escape. M. Roger Holland, II of the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver writes, “These religious folk songs, these ‘Negro Spirituals’ would not have emerged without the convergence of three factors: African culture or idoms, Christianity, and slavery.” I find that sentence jarring, since for the slave poets Christian images provided both a “balm in Gidead” and a verbal cover for the true meaning of their songs. Lorin Plant at Rowan University writes, “As a precious remnant of the encounter between African and European culture in the American South, spirituals give eternal voice to the righteous hope for freedom, justice, and understanding…..Whether in joy, in agony or sorrow, at work and rest, in worship, in defiance, in flight or danger, in death, in remembrance and the ethereal - spirituals illuminate the singing soul at the center of the incomprehensibly stressful lives African-Americans struggled to carve out for themselves under the yoke of slavery. Tied to that soul is a surprisingly hopeful optimism that transcended the wretchedness of the slave experience.”