Music was always commingled with African daily life, and the early slaves brought this tradition with them. In the words of Olaudah Equiano, one of the first West African slaves to write the narrative of his own life: "We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets." Music making was also a communal act, bringing together entire villages for ritual worship, storytelling, and celebration.

Thus the music created in Africa functioned as music of daily experience as well as ritual celebration. This imperative for musical functionality might be viewed as "characteristically African," and the need for such functionality continued in the slave quarters and compounds that serviced the farms and plantations in early America , and ultimately gave rise to the spirituals.

Whether they are referred to as "slave songs," "plantation songs," "Negro spirituals," "black spirituals," or simply "the spirituals," the simple folk songs and melodies, passed down from enslaved Africans to their descendents, served many functions within the slave community. Proliferating in the southern United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of these so-called "sacred" songs was not limited to ritual worship; ranging from storytelling to battle cry, the songs have always been central in the African American struggle for freedom and justice, and have had an unprecedented affect on every facet of African American life. Although some might argue for the invention of jazz, the spirituals are perhaps the most significant musical contribution made by African Americans to American culture. Without them, subsequent African American musical forms such as gospel, jazz, and rap would likely not exist. And since no similar tradition has developed anywhere else within nations of the African Diaspora, the spirituals can be considered uniquely American.

On the shores of the New World, in keeping with the African tradition of musical functionality, captive Africans created songs to accompany and express their daily toil and weariness ("I been ‘buked an’ I been scorned, / Been talked 'bout, sho’s you born"); songs to accompany and express suffering and loss ("Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, / a long ways from home"); and songs to accompany and promote healing and hope ("There is a balm in Gilead, / to make the wounded whole"). And always there were songs of struggle and resistance ("Go Down, Moses / way down in Egypt land, / tell ol' Pharaoh to let my people go!") ("Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel? / Why not a-every man?"). When taken as a whole, the texts of the spirituals not only define the hopes and dreams of a people, but also, in the manner of African proverbs, outline their priorities, values and critical worldview.

Lyrics from the spirituals taken from Songs of Zion, Abington Press, 1981).

Unquestionably, the songs they created functioned as music of spiritual expressivity and practice. However, unlike many Americans, Africans do not live individually toward some "future glory." Rather, they live in a collective present with intent to "ascend" into a collective past and join the ranks of the venerated ancestors.