Given the spiritual’s origins as religious-themed folksongs of the American slave population, the repertory has, in large measure, stayed constant since the Civil War. Yet the ways we have understood and performed this repertory have changed dramatically over time. Tracing this history sheds light on larger forces at play within American culture, especially issues of race.

In the large, spirituals have changed in function along the following lines: The folk songs of the 18th and earlier 19th centuries gave way, after the Civil War, to college-based choral performances of arranged spirituals, and to the earliest publishing of notated collections. In the 20th century spirituals were also commonly performed in solo vocal recitals of “art song,” and in recent decades they have become important staples in the repertory of some of the world’s biggest opera stars, such as Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman. Along with these changes in function and style has come a gradual (though not necessarily steady) move towards treating spirituals as “good” music, as music worthy of value and serious scholarship; this of course broadly parallels the country’s general progress towards ideals of equality. Each of these periods deserves brief comment.

Though the term “spiritual” was not used until the Civil War, clear references to these songs date from the early 19th century. During this time the repertory quickly became controversial. Critics who took European forms of worship for granted were aghast at the “excesses” and “growing evil” of singing “in the merry chorus-manner of the southern harvest field. . . . With every word sung, they have a sinking of one or the other leg, . . . producing an audible sound of the feet at every step. . . . If some in the mean time sit, they strike the sounds alternately on each thigh.”¹⁸ As recounted by Eileen Southern in The Music of Black Americans: A History,¹⁹ though some black preachers encouraged the use of these songs in worship, protests over these Africanized, non-orthodox practices led the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1841 to resolve “that our preachers shall strenuously oppose the singing of . . . hymns of our own composing in our public places and congregations” (p. 131). These disputes surely were not only theological, for whites feared the potential for protest and revolt that these songs might engender.

During the period immediately surrounding the Civil War spirituals were first disseminated outside the African-American community. The events themselves were indeed significant. During the war, spirituals impressed northerners newly exposed to slave culture, and in 1861 a minister sent a letter which included the text to “Go Down, Moses”; word spread, and these lyrics soon ended up published in the New York Tribune. Within two weeks a (quite poor) sheet music version was planned. “Go Down, Moses” became symbolically important to the abolitionists’ cause; it was seen as evidence that the slaves desired freedom. And the interest generated by this song soon led to the first published collection, the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison (now easily available through a reprinting by Dover Publications, 1995).

But this is not simply a tale of the repertory’s success. Reviews of the collection were not exactly glowing: critics called the songs “strange” and not worthy of appreciation, and characterized them as “weird and wild,” “profane and vulgar.”²⁰ And even the collection’s editors framed the songs in demeaning ways, at least from today’s point of view. While lauding the “rich vein of music” they had tapped, the repertory still came from a “half-barbarous people” (p. ii). And the black dialect they attempted to transcribe represented “phonetic decay” and a “corruption” of proper language (p. xxv); there is “probably no speech that has less inflection, or indeed less power of expressing grammatical relation in any way” (p. xxx).

Further, the cheerful notion that the wider culture simply enjoyed spirituals is undermined somewhat by the ways whites appropriated the repertory for their own purposes. The positive reception of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, for example, was wrapped up in a desire to send missionaries to Africa, with the thought that black Christians would meet with more success than white ones.²¹ Indeed, the wide interest in spirituals went hand-in-hand with the later 19th century’s general fascination with the exotic and the related desire to spread empire.²² And other important repertories of African-American folksong, such as work songs, were marginalized in favor of the spiritual. Spirituals seemed especially attractive because they could be seen from the perspective of a shared Christianity, and thus for whites the spiritual represented blacks’ capacity for civilization.²³

With the shift to presenting spirituals in “cultivated” formats like choir concerts and vocal recitals came a pronounced concern with justifying the quality of the repertory. In the 1914 Afro-American Folksongs,²⁴ for example, Henry Edward Krehbiel is concerned with making his study “scientific,” and with “presenting [spirituals] as fit for artistic treatment” in a way “debased” genres like ragtime were not (p. v). And in James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s two Books of American Negro Spirituals,²⁵ which date from the mid-1920s, the African-based ring shout is denigrated as “backward” (first Book, p. 34) so that they can call greater attention to “Christian” features like “higher” melody and “added” harmony that “advances” the repertory beyond African music (p. 19-20). To make the music seem more “classical” in nature the brothers suggest that the songs were usually composed by “talented individuals” (and therefore were not the result of folk-like group activity), and that there are relatively few variants of the songs (for a high number would similarly keep the repertory connected to oral folk traditions) (p. 21). They even propose a number of spiritual melodies that classical composers might consider incorporating within symphonies and other forms of art music (second Book, p. 22-23).

The widespread acceptance of spirituals during this period provides the backdrop for the controversy over whether the repertory was “really” African-American in nature, or instead was merely comprised of African-American versions of white folksongs and hymns. It was not always this way: in the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States, the editors understood the blend of sources that went into the spiritual. The songs “seem to be the natural and original production of [the slaves,] . . . imbued with the mode and spirit of European music – often, nevertheless, retaining a distinct tinge of their native Africa” (p. viii). Yet this issue soon became polarized. In the 1893 Primitive Music, German musicologist Richard Wallaschek first asserted the thesis of white-to-black copying, though he hadn’t visited the United States and hadn’t heard black spirituals sung (!). Soon W.E.B. DuBois’s landmark essay “Of the Sorrow Songs” (1903) and Krehbiel’s Afro-American Folksongs (1914) argued otherwise. The debate shifted back with the publication of George Pullen Jackson’s White and Negro Spirituals (1943), which reasserted that African-American spirituals were black versions of white spirituals. Jackson is a historically important figure; he uncovered the tradition of white spirituals and singing from shape-note hymnbooks. But it seems that for this study, which is based on collections of published spirituals, he had not consulted a number of important sources that might have led him to conclude otherwise, including the two Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925, 1926).

In the generation after Jackson, much in-depth scholarship was done in the service of providing a more complete picture. By interpreting spirituals as a window into the inner life of slaves, historian Miles Mark Fisher could argue in the 1950s that the social significance and context of the spirituals was at least as important as whether a given tune could be traced to white or black origins.²⁶ As late as the 1970s John Lovell, Jr. felt the need to devote a large portion of Black Song: The Forge and the Flame to the “white-to-black” issue,²⁷ and Dena J. Epstein undertook meticulous research in order to document and address the controversy in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals.²⁸ In a 2003 preface attached to a reissue of the book, Epstein notes that “today it is hard to believe that serious writers could have questioned the African element in African American music and dance . . . only half a century ago” (p. xiii).

A comparison of different editions of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the standard English-language reference for music, proves to be a fascinating case study. There have been seven editions of Grove since the 1880s, and the most recent release in 2001 now comprises some 29 volumes.

In the earliest editions of Grove, spirituals were discussed under the heading “Negro Music of the United States.” As one might expect, the language often reflects common contemporary views of African Americans. In the second edition (1907, article by Frank Kidson, Esq.), for example, blacks are seen as “very sensitive to rhythm” (vol. 3, p. 359), their music is “primitive” and “savage” (p. 361), and performances are seductively exotic, for they “so quicken the hearer’s pulse or move him to tears that defects are forgotten” (p. 359-60). As to the issue of origins, a relatively complex picture is presented. The songs are “probably to be regarded as European in melodic origin, translated into rhythms that have been handed down from the generation of slaves who actually came from Africa” (p. 362). And in Kidson’s update of his article for the 1928 third edition, this passage on mixed origins is removed, and a passage is added which stresses the “far-reaching” influences of the spirituals on singers and composers, as well as on newer genres like ragtime and jazz (vol. 3, p. 613).

But in the middle of the century, though the relevant entry was now titled “Spirituals,” George Pullen Jackson himself authored the article, and the coverage changed dramatically. His entry in the fifth edition (1954) is striking. Spirituals are now “not . . . the exclusive property of the American Negroes,” and the black man is said to have found “utter freedom . . . in his newly adopted religion and its song” (vol. 8, p. 8, 10, emphasis added). Whereas the 1920s edition placed less emphasis on origins, here Jackson places the issue center stage: the notion of African origin is a “romantically attractive” fiction; the “real song source” is “the white man’s own country song tradition”; and the large differences between black spirituals and white spirituals with similar texts are due to blacks’ “faulty memory,” “inability or unwillingness to retain” the full melody, and “willingness to make scales of fewer notes” (p. 11). Jackson goes as far as to suggest that the reason most black spirituals can’t be traced back to white melodies is that blacks’ process of producing variants is “accelerated” because they are “utterly free from traditional inhibition” (p. 11).

Amazingly, as Grove was not updated for some time, Jackson’s article stood for over 25 years. As part of the major overhaul that resulted in the 1980 New Grove (the sixth edition), the “Spiritual” entry (without the plural –s) was entirely rewritten yet again, and Jackson’s perspective was considerably softened. The article was now split into two parts, one on the “White Spiritual,” which credited Jackson with being the first to notice this “extensive genre” (vol. 18, p. 1), and a differently authored section on the “Black Spiritual” (by Paul Oliver). In James C. Downey’s “White” section, the perspective was now that white and black spirituals “share . . . certain musical elements, symbolism, and probably a common origin” (p. 1). And in Oliver’s “Black” section, the tone was now much more even-handed: “both positions have had innumerable supporters” (p. 4), and though Jackson’s evidence does much to establish a common source for white and black spirituals, there has been “considerable exchange between traditions” (p. 5).

The update in the most recent Grove (the 2001 seventh edition, officially called the New Grove Second Edition) goes even further to distance itself from Jackson’s claims. Whereas 20 years previous Downey had written that there was “probably a common origin” for white and black spirituals, now that passage reads “probably (in part, at least) a common origin” (vol. 24, p. 189). Oliver’s updated “Black Spirituals” section removes the sentence about how “both positions have had innumerable supporters”; instead, Oliver reports the shaky ground on which Wallaschek’s 1893 claims were based, and explains that it was “Jackson, in particular,” who “argued for white origins” (p. 192). Jackson’s conclusions are now taken to task: even though he was able to show that white versions of specific spirituals were in print before black ones, “priority of publication is hardly proof of origin where folk music is concerned, especially when one body of the music in question is that of a group whose illiteracy was enforced by law” (p. 192).

As witnessed in the current version of Grove, today spirituals are understood to have a depth and vibrancy previous eras did not recognize. While the 1980 Grove focused on the affect of sorrow, the 2001 edition discusses a range of emotion from sorrow to jubilee. The new edition now includes a passage that describes how spirituals are much more varied than published arrangements might imply, and how black traditions are distinct from white ones. Jackson’s old assertion that black spirituals use fewer notes than their white counterparts is offset through a discussion of how black performers employ distinctive “shading of notes” (p. 193). And whereas the earliest editions might describe the sounds of performers as “peculiarly pathetic” and “harsh and strident” (second edition, 1907, vol. 3, p. 359), today we recognize that the distinctive timbres used in a knowledgeable performance truly “enrich the sound” (p. 193).