Given that most people with a strong interest in spirituals have wanted them to be seen as “good” music, as music we should take seriously, there has been a strong desire for spirituals to seem “pure.” Indeed, an assertion of “purity,” as opposed to a characterization like “watered down,” is characteristically used as a way of arguing for something’s inherent value. In the case of spirituals, the assumption is often that the closer a given performance is to African modes of expression (such as call-and-response, improvisation, group participation, and a strong emphasis on rhythmic activity), the better that performance.

In this light, the recordings compiled and edited by Alan Lomax, the eminent scholar of folksong, are often provocative. For example, consider the collection Georgia Sea Island Songs (New World Records, 1977), recorded in the 1960s. According to Lomax’s liner notes, he finds this music interesting precisely because it was largely cut off from the main streams of musical activity, and therefore “in these communities the African cultural heritage was least changed,” and “continued to thrive in a remarkably pure form.” He opens the collection with “Moses” (pointedly not the more well-known “Go Down, Moses), and imagines a scene from the past: “Then he [leader John Davis] began to sing in a hoarse whisper, as if he was talking in a graveyard hideout of runaway slaves.” (Conductors on the Underground Railroad like Harriet Tubman were often referred to as “Moses.”)

And the next track, “Kneebone,” a trance-inducing ring shout led by Joe Armstrong, is similarly attractive because it is “the oldest, the most African of the Sea Island songs.”

Thanks to scholars like Alan Lomax, remarkable performances like these – so different in sound from the arrangements of spirituals most widespread since the Civil War – have been available since the 1940s on a series of recordings released through the Library of Congress.¹ But as Wayne D. Shirley argues in his 1978 introduction to the reissue of Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads, the third of the six-record series, while these choices surely helped preserve a dying art, they also constructed a somewhat skewed picture of cultural and musical purity. To make the performances seem “authentic,” Lomax limited the selections to field recordings, to recordings made in the rural South, and to performances of old styles. These choices help reinforce the sense that African-based practices, ideally untouched by European influences, are more worthy of value. For example, Lomax suggests that at “the rural Negro church . . . the congregation sings from the heart instead of out of hymnbooks,” which at once denigrates white religious practices as less heartfelt and reinforces notions of black worship as “simple,” if “grand.” And such a binary opposition seems to imply that there is such a thing as a unitary “African” identity, even though slaves were brought to North America from numerous areas of that continent and with myriad cultures and languages. Thus even the “purest” spiritual performance is always derived from mixed sources, even if all the sources can be traced back to Africa.

Yet even recordings like these are rich with counterexamples, where the materials being used are derived from mixed sources. Needless to say, this does not dilute the excitement generated by the performance at all. On Georgia Sea Island Songs, for example, Lomax includes “See Aunt Dinah,” a song associated with the Virginia reel, a type of British folk dance. And the performance of “Run, Old Jeremiah” on Afro-American Spirituals, Work Songs, and Ballads, while a ring shout, the style with the clearest connections to African practice, traces no straight line from Africa to this 1934 recording: the Louisiana community heard here had only “recently reintroduced the ring-shout as a means of attracting” a younger, dance-oriented generation to the church.

Indeed, most performances of spirituals since the later 19th century are undeniable hybrids. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, for example, the group from Fisk University that did so much to popularize the spiritual with their tours in the 1870s, adapted their performance style to fit the expectations of a white, “cultured” audience. They sang from planned arrangements full of western harmonies, did not emphasize black dialect in their pronunciation, and stood still while performing. Yet their style, while not “pure,” is still shot through with a different sort of authenticity. Their manner of performance is a direct reflection of emancipated slaves’ strong desire during this period to obtain the education long denied them, and to lead white listeners to hear their music as “good” music. While changing the traditional way of performing spirituals, they created a new tradition nonetheless, one without which this music may have never been preserved.

Today spirituals can be heard in a myriad of performance styles, which takes nothing away from the historical importance and emotional impact of spirituals as performed on the Lomax recordings. A wonderful hybrid can be found on the album Jubilant (Sony Classical, 1998). Here, religious-themed spirituals are interpreted by Jubilant Sykes, a baritone trained in the secular opera tradition, and all within a jazz format that can still bring to mind that genre’s “lowbrow” roots (and indeed, the recording is produced by Terence Blanchard).

There is an important racial backdrop for these issues surrounding the notion of purity. For the better part of the twentieth century a debate simmered over whether spirituals, the best-known genre of American folk music, are “really” African-American in origin or instead were an African-American imitation of white hymns and folk music. A number of respected scholars presented evidence that questioned the purity of the black spiritual, and many others worked hard to refute this point of view. In the seminal book Afro-American Folksongs (1914),² for example, the white scholar Henry Edward Krehbiel aimed to “disprove [the] contention that [spirituals] are nothing more than imitations of European songs” (p. 83). As James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson put it in The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925),³ “the opinion of these critics is not sound. It is not based on scientific or historical inquiry. Indeed, it can be traced ultimately to a prejudiced attitude of mind, to an unwillingness to concede the creation of so much pure beauty to a people they wish to feel is absolutely inferior” (p. 14). And much more recently, Eileen Southern explains that even though there are often clear “interrelations” that can be found between spirituals and white Protestant hymns, “the spiritual is a refashioning . . . and not simply a different version. . . . The spiritual is another song type with its own text, music, and distinctive stylistic features.”⁴ Lomax’s recordings, which make the case in sound for strong African connections, should be heard in this light. Even if one gives the spirituals’ critics the benefit of the doubt on the issue of racism, it is striking that their knowledge of spirituals was often derived not first-hand, but from published sheet music, which was often arranged to fit western stylistic norms in the first place. And indeed, this misunderstanding stretches back to the original Fisk Jubilee Singers, as listeners tended to assume that their performance style was historically authentic. (For more on this issue, see “Understanding Spirituals Differently at Different Times.”)

And yet, it is worth noting that both sides in this debate tend to take the value of purity for granted. It often seems that either the spiritual is “pure,” and therefore worthy of value, or derived from mixed sources, and therefore “impure” and suspect as such a special repertory. Instead, we can value this repertory precisely for the way it blends disparate traditions. (The very notion of musical purity is something of an anachronism when applied to spirituals, anyway: even in the realm of classical music, imitation was a widely accepted practice during the 17th and 18th centuries. It is surely telling that this controversy over spirituals arose only during a period when originality had become an essential part of classical music’s value system.) As Lydia Parrish puts it in her 1942 collection Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands,⁵ “without the remarkable musical gift and deeply religious nature of the African slave, there would have been no soul-stirring sacred songs. On the other hand, without the contact with Western music and the inspiration provided by the Bible – at the hands of the slave-owners – these selfsame songs might never have come into existence” (p. 3-4).