In many discussions about spirituals, focusing on the repertory’s earliest existence as slaves’ religious folk songs is often opposed to focusing on arrangements of spirituals for a solo singer or a choir, as has been most common since the Civil War. See for example, the discussion of “Controversy” in The Performing Arts section of the current website.

On the one hand, at certain times arrangements have been placed in the most positive light, given their proximity to “cultivated” traditions of “art music.” For example, in the period just after the Civil War, performing arranged spirituals was a way of asserting the humanity and intelligence of a community long considered inferior. As Bernice Johnson Reagon has put it, “the concert spiritual tradition had a power: it was a voice of the campus, it was the musical cultural outpouring that emerged as African Americans carried out their dream of getting an education and building a stronger community. . . . Their songs documented a great cultural transition as the race surged forward.”⁶

And during the 1950s, on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, the classically-trained singer Roland Hayes recorded arrangements of spirituals in a way that often suggested the trappings of “classical music.” In one case, Hayes places thirteen spirituals in a set order to tell the Passion story. Thus individual songs are grouped together to create the impression of a monumental structure similar in length to a symphony, and it is no accident that Hayes refers to this as a “song cycle,” which is a clear reference to European art song practices of the Romantic era. When recording other spirituals, Hayes is so classically oriented that he feels the need to take special notice of, say, the fair amount of syncopation in “Two Wings” and the folk music-derived pentatonic scale in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” And even though the printed lyrics for “Didn’t My Lord” renders the word “children” in black dialect (“chillun”), Hayes’ performance itself clearly pronounces the word in standard English.

On the other hand, given the strong tendency to value music that seems more “pure” (see “Spirituals as ‘Pure’ / Spirituals as Derived from Mixed Sources”), at other times it is the original folksong format has been seen as “better.” In these cases the arrangements are considered suspect, and approached as if they inherently take something away from the power of the spiritual.

Much of this perspective stems from the fact that western music notation is not a very strong tool for capturing much of what makes spirituals distinctive. Thus many arrangers have aimed to incorporate notated versions of folksong elements: in the 1925 Book of American Negro Spirituals,⁷ for example, James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson state that they “have sincerely striven to give the characteristic harmonies that would be used in spontaneous group singing” (p. 37). But the issue is not so much getting “characteristic” notes down as grappling with how much is simply not possible to capture through printed notes in the first place. In the early study Afro-American Folksongs (1914),⁸ Henry Edward Krehbiel quotes Emily Hallowell’s collection “Calhoun Plantation Songs”: even though “I have tried to write them down just as they were sung, . . . those who have heard these or other like songs . . . will realize that it is impossible to more than suggest” the inflections of performance (p. 86-7). This point of view is taken up by Alan Lomax in the liner notes to his recorded collection Georgia Sea Island Songs (New World Records, 1977), where he argues that “what the printed page could not convey was the truly African pattern that shaped the performances of the spirituals.”

The issue is even deeper than accurate transcription, though. Even if a published arrangement could be successfully descriptive of a folksong performance, it cannot help but then be used prescriptively, limiting future performances in ways that belie the very nature of folksong. Arrangements take an orally-based musical practice full of improvisation and participation, and transform it into fixed performances of printed music for a largely passive audience. And arrangements, given that they can transcend a song’s original time and place, can take the focus away from the essential historical contexts of the spirituals, including their function in the antebellum South as a means of secret communication among slaves and with conductors of the Underground Railroad. (See, for example, the discussion on Spirituals as Coded Communication in the Freedom and Equality section of the current website).

Yet such an opposition between spirituals as folk song and spirituals in cultivated arrangements is difficult to sustain in the face of myriad examples that blur the boundaries. For example, on Lomax’s recorded collection Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads (1942; reissue on Rounder Records, 1998), two prisoners at a Mississippi State Penitentiary sing in a prized, authentic manner, yet the “extraordinary” performance is actually “an adaptation of a modern arrangement of a spiritual for quartet.” One simply cannot easily separate a “pure” performance from a less authentic, arranged one, for this example makes it clear that folksong performers had knowledge of and were influenced by more “artistically” minded arrangements.

Similarly, a song such as “I Wanna Go Where Jesus Is,” which is often sung by congregations in Southern Baptist churches, is actually a twentieth-century composition written by Reverend C. J. Johnson in the style of the old traditions. Johnson recorded his music commercially, and this song was so popular that it earned a gold record in 1970.

A group like the Richard Allen Singers presents an interesting case. These performers sing in an early nineteenth-century style, the style that was used at the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church by the Reverend Richard Allen. Yet their style comes not from an oral tradition that can be traced back to its beginnings, but rather from a carefully researched, meticulously planned, Smithsonian-sponsored, late twentieth-century reconstruction of that style. To simply call this folksong performance misses much of the nuance.

At the same time, classical music performers don’t necessarily approach spirituals from a purely classical perspective either. Even within a standard art song singer-with-piano format, soprano Barbara Hendricks’ performances can be quite improvisatory and full of vocal inflections.

And for all the “art music” trappings surrounding the recording Spirituals in Concert (sung by opera greats Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman; supported by a chorus and orchestra conducted by opera maestro James Levine; packaged with liner notes by classical music critic and opera conductor Will Crutchfield; and released in 1991 on the prestigious classical label Deutsche Grammophon), the audience is especially taken with the performance of “Scandalize My Name,” which includes numerous quasi-improvisatory moments, much interaction between the performers, and an interpretation that Crutchfield describes as “fully secularized.” This performance is far from a staid concert rendition, and at the same time it is just as far from a folksong-like expression of religious sentiments.