It is abundantly clear that spirituals cannot be understood in a deeply satisfying way solely through study of "the music itself," which, for western culture, conventionally means the music as written down. Rather, the historical and cultural context surrounding spirituals is an essential factor, and one must have the sounds of spirituals in their ears. When a performer is using a collection of arrangements, such as James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson's 1925 Book of American Negro Spirituals,⁹ a rendition faithful only to the printed music will not do the song justice.

The Johnsons recognized this; in their Preface they acknowledge that a European performer may "play the notes correctly, but any American can at once detect that there is something lacking. The trouble is, they play the notes too correctly; and do not play what is not written down" (p. 28). But simply imitating earlier performances, even excellent ones, is also not enough: "white singers are, naturally, prone to go to either of two extremes: to attempt to render a Spiritual as though it were a Brahms song, or to assume a 'Negro unctuousness' that is obviously false, and painfully so. I think white singers, concert singers, can sing Spirituals - if they feel them. But to feel them it is necessary to know the truth about their origin and history, to get in touch with the association of ideas that surround them, and to realize something of what they have meant in the experiences of the people who created them" (p. 29). Such a stance applies not only to a general mode of interpretation, but also to specific performance choices, such as the use of black dialect. The Johnsons argue that it is important to use dialect, for "most [spirituals] lose in charm when they are sung in straight English" (p. 43). Yet black dialect is not a singular thing that can be learned in a straightforward way, as the practice is variable throughout the South. "It is more a matter of ear" - that is, of being immersed in and understanding the context from which the dialect arises - "than of rules" (p. 44).

Grappling with context can also deepen our understanding of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and the story of how they popularized the spiritual after the Civil War (See The Performing Arts section of the current website). Though it has been common to think about the group as merely accommodating their audience through watered-down versions of spirituals, in their historical context, their mode of performance made quite a political statement. An audience of this generation would have been familiar with the minstrel show, a blackface spectacle with racist overtones, and the Fisk group made a point of not including any of the jokes, dances, and popular tunes that would have been associated with minstrelsy. Indeed, the very name "Jubilee Singers" was adopted by the group to sever the public's associations between black performers and the minstrel show. Further, Andrew Ward's study of the group¹⁰ shows that they did not simply cater to whites: they insisted on performing for integrated audiences, they would perform songs with pointed subversive meanings, and they would not accept discriminatory treatment while on tour.

And as popular as the Fisk Jubilee Singers were, their greatest contribution to spreading the repertory of spirituals may not have come during their 1870s tours at all, but through their commercial recordings made decades later (beginning in 1909). Tim Brooks has recently uncovered much of this history.¹¹ Here, too, the group (recorded as a quartet due to limitations of technology) broke new ground: previously, African American recordings had been vaudeville-based (and were therefore connected to minstrel show traditions), and had been marketed under the label "coon songs"; the Fisk singers were listed as "folk music." At the time of their first recording, for the Victor Talking Machine Company, that label had no non-white faces in their catalog at all. And like the numerous groups that sprang up in the 1870s to take advantage of the Fisk singers' popularity, soon a number of other companies developed similar recording projects.

Understanding spirituals' context also helps to distinguish the repertory from a style like gospel, which often uses spirituals as raw material. Eileen Southern explains the differences effectively in The Music of Black Americans: A History.¹² (See also a brief sketch of the differences in the History section of the current website). Most surviving spirituals were probably from the early 19th century, rural in origin, and likely incorporated folk and hymn materials. Gospel, meanwhile, dates to the mid 19th century, stems from musical activity in urban churches, and incorporated existing spirituals, as well as popular tunes. Spiritual texts tend to be group oriented, while gospel texts tend to focus on the individual. And spirituals are usually performed a cappella, while gospel performances use instruments. Through the twentieth century there was a general movement, a "passing of the torch" as Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. describes it,¹³ from performing spirituals in the manner of the college choirs to performing them with a gospel ensemble.

At the same time, studying "the music itself" can be, of course, quite useful in its own right. The earliest close examination of spirituals as a means of describing their musical style was undertaken in Henry Edward Krehbiel's 1914 Afro-American Folksongs.¹⁴ There is at least one example in this study where knowledge of context might lead to incorrect assumptions about the music. At this point in history, it was conventional to assert that most of the songs were in a minor key. This was probably related to the melancholy affect found in many lyrics. But Krehbiel compiled most of the available collections, and through a survey of over 500 songs, concluded that actually only 12% were in a minor key (pp. 43-4). Most of the rest were in a major key, or based on a folk-music inflected pentatonic scale. Krehbiel also attempted to trace the African origins of many of the distinctive melodic characteristics he found, including ones still quite familiar in popular song to this day, such a flatted seventh scale degree within a major key.

It is also fruitful to consider the intersections between the poles of this binary opposition, simultaneously approaching spirituals through context and through "the music itself." Performance practice is an area where one can contemplate how a performer's understanding of the repertory's culture, history, and feel interacts with the music as written down.

For example, compare J. Rosamond Johnson's arrangement of "Somebody's Knockin' at Yo' Do,'" from the 1925 Book of Negro Spirituals, to a performance by the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals.¹⁵ Note the various differences in the performed melody as compared to the published arrangement. Perhaps more important is that a communal element not present in the arrangement is clear in the recording, as the opening line is presented by the leader, and then followed by the rest of the group. The arrangement suggests that the song should be in a moderately slow 4/4 meter, while this group sings in a faster "cut time" with only two beats to the measure, and emphasizes the offbeats with clapping. Further, note how the group makes each phrase of the refrain last a smooth 4 measures, whereas Johnson's arrangement places most of the phrases into less comfortable 3-measure groups. And finally, this group's performance consists entirely of repeating the refrain, while the arrangement includes a different section for various verses. Johnson's arrangement lends itself to a concert performance, not only through its suggestion of voice-with-piano, but through its slow and serious affect, and through its tricky phrase structure and contrasting sections. These performers, though, make choices that highlight the repertory's communal and joyful aspects.

Even when sung as an "art song," the format suggested by Johnson's arrangement, the inflections of a real performance can be considerable. Compare the collection's version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" to soprano Barbara Hendricks' recording of the song on Great American Spirituals vol. 9 (Angel Records, 1992). Though the arrangement again implies seriousness through the suggestion of a very slow tempo, Hendricks (with Russian pianist Dimitri Alexeev) takes a much more moderate speed. Alexeev's accompaniment comes across as quite improvisatory, and Hendricks constantly plays with rhythm, phrasing, and pitch, often using blues-derived swoops up to the expected note. An especially nice touch is how Hendricks adds to the effect of the word "swing" by singing the syllable quite ahead of the downbeat, whereas traditional arrangements, including Johnson's, start the phrase squarely at the beginning of the measure.

When contemplating performance practice, then, it seems that we might prize choices that take us closer to the original "feel" of the spirituals than the "feel" we might hear in a performance that largely sticks to a published arrangement. In his landmark study Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972),¹⁶ John Lovell, Jr. complains that "the most widely accepted interpretations . . . are far from reasonable, let alone in accordance with the best evidence" (p. xiii). This could easily collapse into an appeal to perform spirituals in a "pure" way, in a manner that approximates their pre-Civil War existence as folksong, and similar to the style heard on Alan Lomax's recorded compilations for the Library of Congress (see Spirituals as "Pure" / Spirituals as Derived from Mixed Sources for more on this topic). But as contexts for the spirituals have changed over time, it is just as reasonable to recreate different sorts of historically informed performances, ones that reflect original conditions, others that use the important styles employed by college choirs like the Fisk Jubilee Singers after the Civil War, and a host of more modern styles as well.

As Lovell suggests, it would indeed be attractive to place more emphasis than we currently do on performing spirituals in light of what we know about how they sounded before the Civil War. But I would argue for this on different grounds than suggesting that such performances would possess some sort of aesthetic "purity." Rather, I would adapt Richard Taruskin's perspective on the "historical performance movement" within the classical music world.¹⁷ The reason why we may find folksong performances of spirituals so powerful is not because they're historically accurate - we have no way of knowing this definitively, anyway - but because they speak to us today, in our current context. Compared to the generations at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, today it is much more widely accepted that music does not need to resemble "classical music" to be valued highly. We are far less reliant on the characteristics of "cultivated" performance to be convinced of a style's inherent worth. When we are stirred by communally improvised folksongs, by their body-moving rhythms and rough timbres and textures, and by their deep humanity, we may be in a better position to value spirituals as they are, and not as previous generations of listeners wished them to be.