The world enjoys African-American solo spirituals everywhere, but American singers in the last half century have found fewer occasions to sing or record them. This may be due in part to the troubled racial history of the American performing stage, especially in the shadow of blackface minstrelsy, and in the larger realm of a nation struggling mightily with its racial legacy. Part One of this two-part series explored a combination of elements: the barrier of race in solo spirituals; white discomfort with Negro dialect and conjuring the ghosts of blackface minstrelsy; possible rebuke by some African-Americans who believe America’s largely unaddressed racial history creates an atmosphere of distrust of whites who sing these sacred songs; or rebuke from African-Americans because it reminds them of a dark time best forgotten.
Part One also called on us to reflect on the reasons everyone should sing solo spirituals, although for the most part, white Americans don’t. Singing spirituals is centrally important to our education and racial transcendence as a nation. Building on the affirmative premise that solo African-American spirituals are suitable literature for everyone on the concert stage, I suggested that singing African-American spirituals could bring blacks and whites intimately closer together.
Part Two identifies important resources that can help make African-American spirituals an active part of our singing lives. Our nation is still coming to grips with its complex racial legacy. African-American spirituals provide a positive means to that end. The path to understanding our nation’s racial legacy passes through our shared joys, pains and sorrows, rather than painfully forgetting or fearfully ignoring them. Learning to love, teach—and especially, to sing solo spirituals—brings us closer to humbly reconciling the truth of what we are, together.
Spirituals Are Central to Our Education and Performing Lives
Certainly there is no corresponding reluctance to perform spirituals within the world of choral music, where almost every choral ensemble—white or black, black and white, whether middle school, high school, college or community chorus, from the highest ranks in the choral art to the most fledgling—includes spirituals on its programs. Choral spirituals are extremely popular, and white soloists perform freely in them. Americans sing spirituals around campfires, at summer retreats, on board school buses, in churches, at festivals, and at informal gatherings of singers, young and old, across the country. From Minnesota to Florida to California, from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the Harvard Glee Club to the Chicago Children’s Choir, African-American spirituals are a beloved staple of modern choral repertoire.
This is true not only in America, but across the face of the globe. Somewhere deep in my memory I even remember the Vienna Boys Choir bringing down the house with a heartfelt Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. The choral literature of African-American composers and arrangers—Hall Johnson, Edward Boatner, Harry T. Burleigh, William Dawson, Nathaniel Dett, Jester Hairston, Lena McLin, Florence Price, Eugene Simpson, William Grant Still, Undine Smith Moore, Roland Carter, John Work, Wendell Whalum, and Moses Hogan—stands alongside arrangements by distinguished white American composers and arrangers such as Robert Shaw, Jack Halloran, Alice Parker, and Norman Luboff. In September 2001, Oxford Music Press, seizing on popular interest, issued its 404-page choral anthology of great American spirituals, Oxford Book of Spirituals, edited by the late Moses Hogan, containing spirituals by many of these leading black and white composers and arrangers.9 Based on the world’s love of choral spiritual arrangements, Oxford’s anthology is a success.
Problems Crossing the Color Line
Although several white artists have successfully breached the racial dividing line in pop, rap, blues, jazz, and even gospel music, there have been substantial problems, including enormous commercial exploitation issues, misappropriations, misattributions, and denied or trivialized African-American influences suggested in the criticisms of works by Elvis Presley, rapper Vanilla Ice, the New Kids on the Block, or even Eminem, just for examples.9 Blackface minstrelsy has been the primary example of the way American popular culture exploits and manipulates African-Americans and their culture.9
Even with these mitigating difficulties, inspired artists in this country have worked successfully through many of our societal racial animosities to express themselves. Their successful paths have not been formulaic. Several crossover artists have noted that crediting their African-American inspirations played an important role in their successes. Some of popular music’s positive examples, such as Bruce Springsteen, The Beatles, Jon B, George Michael, and Justin Timberlake, have provided healing examples for all in the classical solo-vocal world to consider.
With subjects such as spirituals, slavery, discrimination, and especially blackface minstrelsy, the element of race is important.
“It appears that a race-blind approach, one where race is irrelevant, would be ineffective in dealing with this subject,”9 writes Scott Malcomson, author of One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Malcomson rightly suggests that under the circumstances in America, a look beyond race may have strange consequences, since race itself, being historical, resists an historical explanation.9
Possibly, the only way through this problem is through it. CJ Williamson, Editor in Chief of Classical Singer Magazine, said that sometimes “the only way to get rid of the infection of discrimination is by opening the wound.”9 We can begin the healing process by breaking the silence surrounding our racial legacy in music.
The performing arts became a fundamental platform used in defining and spreading the contagions of racial stereotype, fear, discrimination, fear, pain and antipathy. Through the African-American spiritual, the performing arts can again transmit important messages about our cultural life—messages of beauty, hope, strength, action, transformation, transcendence, and racial understanding.
I Believe We Can Fly
Needed changes in the classical solo-vocal tradition should begin with education and understanding. During my undergraduate music degree program, and later two graduate degree programs at one of the largest conservatories in the Midwest, I can honestly say that the only people who routinely sang spirituals were African-Americans. I heard no spirituals on the solo-vocal programs of any of my white colleagues, although programmatically such music would be appropriate and relevant. By my recollection, none any of the applied voice professors sang spirituals or taught their white students spirituals. Our general history of Western music courses completely omitted the subjects of blackface minstrelsy and spirituals.
For the sake of the music and our national history together, this must change. We can and should move consciously forward together. Like the butterfly, I believe we can fly, but our cocoon of silence and ambivalence will have to go. We need confidence and character to make progress on these fronts.
Resources for African-American Spirituals
1– A respectful knowledge of African-American spiritual history and music is the beginning of a useful cultural understanding that contributes to authentic performance. Black and white audiences are willing to extend an abundance of understanding and encouragement when artists approach with these essentials intact. If what is taking place in the choral world suggests a healthy enthusiasm in the populace for spirituals, then solo voice professors have a useful model to follow for success.
White solo artists may feel greater comfort teaching and performing solo spirituals by using many of the same techniques used in the preparation of other sensitive literature. A commanding knowledge of the spiritual and America’s racial history is fundamentally important for the teacher, performer and audience member.
Voice teachers can take the lead on this preparation and guide others carefully through it. It is necessary to review the odious legacy of blackface and how its consciousness of oppression and discrimination has seriously affected our racial perceptions, including solo spirituals performed by whites in dialect on the concert stage. The subject should be an important part of our general Western music history courses, classical and popular.
For a perspective on blackface minstrelsy, I recommend three books: Robert C. Toll’s Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America; Eric Lott’s Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class; Bean, Hatch and McNamara’s Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy. I recommend the extensive blackface materials that are part of the PBS SPECIAL/WGHB American Experience Stephen Foster website,9 which includes important questions with answers by four historians on the subject. I strongly recommend beginning with Marlon Riggs’ 58-minute documentary Ethnic Notions: Black People in White Minds (1987) from California Newsreel. 9 These resources may help change perceptions forever.
Several key reference books offer a history of the spiritual and its meaning and place in the lives of African-Americans. John Lovell’s Black Song: The Forge and the Flame, a highly detailed volume of encyclopedic importance on African-American spirituals, is absolutely indispensable. Arthur C. Jones’ Wade in the Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals is an insightful, classically well-integrated book on the wealth of information and social implications of spiritual traditions. Dr. Jones references 59 spirituals in a startling, authoritative discussion. The endnotes and bibliography are priceless. This book is also essential.
2– African-American spirituals are suitable literature to be sung by all on the concert stage. This statement reaffirms the obvious, but remains necessary. Vincent Harding’s forward in “Wade in the Water” is an important caveat:
“…the spirituals are available to all persons who are prepared to open themselves to the unsettling, healing power that inhabits these marvelous songs of life. These songs were created out of “deeply meaningful, archetypally human experiences, relevant not only to the specific circumstances of slavery but also to women and men struggling with issues of justice, freedom and spiritual wholeness in all times and places.” 9
Perhaps more important than voice and technique, the attitude of the singer is the critical ingredient necessary for successful performance. Hall Johnson calls it the “one all-important consideration—the right mental attitude on the part of the singer.” 9
3– Search deep within the text and music for the proper attitude and spirit—the true expression begins to reveal itself. Jones states it clearly:
“I am convinced that it is impossible to gain a full understanding of the spirituals from an examination of song lyrics alone, without hearing (and especially singing) the rhythms and melodies of the songs as well.9”
Consulting Black Song: The Forge and the Flame by John Lovell, Jr.,9 and Jones’ “Wade in the Water” will greatly assist in meaningful analysis. They are essential references on spiritual texts, their poetic and melodic structures, hidden meanings, and biblical sub-references. For example, Lovell points out that the words love and hate are very rarely mentioned in spirituals, the word hate hardly at all.9 Yet, spirituals are full of the demonstration of love. “The fact that the spiritual has no word for hate seems rightly to suggest that hate is a useless commodity . . . .”9
Fabulous. Arthur Jones adds:
“We have much to learn from these wise composers and singers, for many of them were able to transcend an experience of extreme degradation, emerging from it as spiritually, morally and emotionally evolved human beings. The fact that there were so many emotional and physical casualties is not shocking; the fact that there were so many who emerged from their suffering to live on psychological and spiritual ‘higher ground’ is . . . All of these spirituals teach us, more effectively than any other means imaginable, the unlimited possibilities for human transformation and the manner in which the transformation process is aided and supported by the power of song and symbol.”
I also found Howard Thurman’s Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, James Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation, and Paul Robeson’s Here I Stand very helpful.
4– Try to approach the subject of “Negro dialect” with understanding. Struggling to grasp the language of their masters under the most oppressive and extreme conditions, African slaves in America made great efforts to learn English, many times spoken in dialect by lower- and working-class Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English immigrants living in the American South. At least 70 percent of the ancestors of Americans of African descent came from the Mande (West African) and Bantu (Central African) ethnic groups.9 These diverse people represented a multiplicity of complex linguistic sources that did not contain several sounds in common with the English language. For almost 300 years, more than 90 percent of these African-Americans lived in the South, accounting for the Southerness of African-American English.9
As a legacy of slavery and segregation, many vestiges continued in the pronunciations of slave descendants. For example, the “th” sound was alien and difficult. This sound, especially at the beginning of words, became “d” in approximation:9
than became dan
they became dey
the became de
that became dat
this became dis
with became wid
father became fader (perhaps influenced by Scotchish dialects)
The “th” sound at the end of words became “f” in approximation:9
mouth became mouf
truth became trufe
breath became bref
path became paf
In difficulty, sometimes “th” was omitted altogether: (neither became ne’er).9
The final “r” and the postvocalic “r” (“r” at the end of a word or after a vowel) was not heard—instead a vowel sound replaced it.9
summer became summah
torn became toe
your became yo
In difficulty, final consonant groups sometimes were reduced to a vowel sound or a single consonant sound.9
cold became coal
From his life-long study and performance of spirituals, Hall Johnson, in the preface of his anthology Thirty Spirituals Arranged for Piano And Voice, instructed that the racial qualities of the words “should neither be unduly exaggerated in the hope of being more entertaining nor, still worse, ‘purified’ into correct English—for any reason whatever. Either process would utterly spoil the artistic integrity of the performance.” 9 Johnson further suggested that dialect forms did not necessarily arise from “ignorance of the correct pronunciation.” 9
Sometimes they were deliberately chosen in order to avoid harsh or difficult sounds, or to render the word more serviceable for the immediate occasion. Especially in the Negro folk song, the word is always made adjustable to the rhythm of the music. Consequently, this altered word-form may vary all the way from the correct English pronunciation to the most extreme contractions of the dialect. . . .Here are examples of some of the most familiar alterations:
H eaven—Hev’n—Heb’m—Heb’n—or just He’m
Children—chil-dun—child’n—chillun
There—dere—dey or day
For—f?h or f’
To—t? or t’
My—ma—m?h or m’9
Johnson also insisted that ‘de’ (like the) is always pronounced ‘dee’ before vowels and ‘duh’ before consonants. 9 The preface notes to Johnson’s anthology are very useful to the informed spiritual singer.
Several important textbooks discuss many anomalies of African-American dialect speech patterns, making the experience of singing “Negro dialect” understandable. I recommend: The Books of American Negro Spirituals by James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson; Black Talk: Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner, revised edition by Geneva Smitherman; Lexicon of Black English or Perspectives on Black English by J. L. Dillard; and American Regional English Today by Allan Metcalf.
5– Listen to classic spiritual recordings by leading African-American singers and closely note their many stylistic treatments. There are many fine examples, including Roberta Alexander, Marian Anderson, Martina Arroyo, Kathleen Battle, Wilhelmenia Fernandez, Denyce Graves, Hilda Harris, Roland Hayes, Richard Heard, Mahalia Jackson, Kevin Maynor, Robert McFerrin, Oral Moses, Jessye Norman, Odetta, Jo Ann Pickens, Leontyne Price, Florence Quivar, Derek Lee Ragin, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Paul Robeson, Louise Toppin, and William Warfield.
One of my all-time favorite recordings of spirituals is Robert McFerrin’s Deep River and Other Classic Negro Spirituals, which is currently out of print, but found still in many library collections around the country. It is one of the first recordings of spirituals the recording industry should consider for re-issue. “Deep River” is an outstanding collection of 14 spirituals, recorded in New York City in June 1957. The recording sessions occurred two years after Mr. McFerrin’s debut as the first African-American male performer ever at the Metropolitan Opera, and only the second African-American after the historic first performance of Marian Anderson in 1955.
This recording is noteworthy for more than the exemplary performance by Mr. McFerrin and his accompanist, Norman Johnson, and for more than the fact that this is one of a handful of spiritual recordings by African-American men. Along with arrangements by Burleigh, Still, and Lawrence, Mr. McFerrin’s recording represents one of the largest collections of some of the best of Hall Johnson solo-spiritual settings ever recorded (11)—a tour de force.
Mr. McFerrin’s baritone voice is in remarkable profile, and his timing and expression, especially in the works, “Ain’t Got Time To Die,” “I Got To Lie Down,” “Oh Glory,” “Witness,” “Ride On,” and “King Jesus,” are hallmarks of the style. (See Table 1 below.)
Table I
Robert McFerrin’s 1957 Recording Deep River and Other Classic Negro Spirituals
Title Arrangement
Ev’ry time I feel de spirit arr. Hall Johnson
Fix me, Jesus arr. Hall Johnson
His name so sweet arr. Hall Johnson
I’m gonter tell God all o my troubles arr. Hall Johnson
Swing low, sweet chariot arr. Hall Johnson
A city called Heaven arr. Hall Johnson
Ain’t got time to die Hall Johnson
Here’s one arr. William Grant Still
Let us break bread together arr. William Lawrence
Deep river arr. Harry T. Burleigh
I got to lie down arr. Hall Johnson
Oh, Glory arr. Hall Johnson
Witness arr. Hall Johnson
Ride on, King Jesus arr. Hall Johnson
6– Recruit leading African-American vocal artists to teach the spiritual style. Attend and sing in voice classes, workshops, and master classes where the spiritual is the focus. Hall Johnson strongly suggests that the singer who has no first-hand acquaintance with the authentic racial style of spirituals should have “for the best results, either an intelligent model or a coach who is thoroughly familiar with this music at its source. 9 Many leading African-American voice teachers annually coach students in the current spiritual repertoire. For example, the annual convention of the National Association of Negro Musicians is a terrific forum for contacting excellent senior African-American concert artists, like Silvia Olden Lee, or in the recent past, the late William Warfield. Lovers of music throughout the world honor William Warfield as one of the great vocal artists of our time, as he achieved stardom in every field open to a singer’s art. Silvia Olden Lee (who concertized with Paul Robeson) is noted as the first African-American woman on the Metropolitan Opera staff and as a world-renowned vocal coach. Her students include Kathleen Battle, Jessye Norman, and Wilhelmenia Fernandez.
In a year that has witnessed the enormous losses of William Warfield, Moses Hogan, and former Harvard African-American musicologist Eileen Southern, three leading exponents of the spiritual, suddenly our efforts to understand and perform the spiritual have been greatly diminished.
7– Sing accompanied or unaccompanied solo spiritual arrangements. I have included a list of African-American spiritual anthologies following the endnotes. Singers originally performed spirituals without accompaniment or audience: all in attendance sang.9 Early arrangements, such as those by Burleigh, Work, Johnson and Johnson, and Boatner, add color and support to the vocal line. Piano arrangements by Hall Johnson and Moses Hogan also add sophisticated counterpoint and dimension to all the rhythmic texture. Many spiritual arrangements, some of the most elaborate, are published as single, individual settings.
Singers should also remember that a long unaccompanied performance tradition exists for spirituals of every style and tempo. Virtually any spiritual can be performed effectively and stylistically in this manner. Careful focus on the text, form, scale, color notes, strong rhythmic elements, silences, and a text-inspired sense of improvisatory embellishment transform the smallest melody into a prayerful intercession. Many African-Americans continue to believe that the unaccompanied spiritual is the highest form of the art. Sung either way, accompanied or unaccompanied, they are expressive.
8– Consult major library collections for African-American spiritual resources. Education centers across the country have gathered special collections of materials dealing with the history of African-American arrangers and performers of spirituals. In addition to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, and The E. Azalia Hackley Collection of Negro Music, Dance and Drama in Detroit, here is a brief list of important collections of African-American arrangers and performers across the nation. (See Table II below.)
Table II
Collections of Spirituals, Arrangers, and Performers
Collection Location
Anderson, Marian University of Pennsylvania, Penn Library Collection
Burleigh, Harry T. Atlanta University Center, Harry P. Slaughter Collection
Dawson, William Emory University, Woodruff Library Afr-Amer Collection
Dett, Robert Nathaniel Hampton University Library, Harvey Library Collection
Duncan, Todd University of Michigan School of Music
Fisk Jubilee Singers Fisk University Library Special Collections
Hayes, Roland E. Azalia Hackley Collection, Detroit Public Library
Roland Hayes Museum, Calhoun Gordon Arts Council Calhoun, GA
Jessye, Eva Eva Jessye Collection, Leonard H. Axe Library,
Pittsburg State University [Kansas]
Johnson, Hall Rowan University Music Library (in preparation)
Johnson, James Weldon Fisk University Library Special Collections
Jones, Sissieretta Howard University Moorland-Springarn Research Center
Nicolas Slonimsky Collection, Library of Congress
Moore, Undine Smith Indiana University, Undine Smith Moore Collection
Price, Florence B. University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections
Robeson, Paul Columbia College, Chicago, IL, Robeson Centennial Celeb.
Howard University Moorland-Springarn Research Center
New York Public Library, Robeson Collection
Princeton Public Library
University of Chicago, Robeson Archives Listings
Still, William Grant Duke University Special Collections Library
University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections
Warfield, William Eastman School of Music Silbey Music Library
University of Michigan School of Music
Work III, John Wesley Fisk University Library Special Collection
Perhaps the most impressive collection I have referenced in the past year has been the Marian Anderson Papers at the University of Pennsylvania, housed in the Penn Special Collections of Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library. It is the principal repository of her personal and career documents, which date from early in her performing career (before 1926), to late in her retirement (1993). Miss Anderson donated most of her materials in three intervals during 1977, 1987, and 1991.
The collection comprises 495 boxes containing correspondence (6,500 folders with over 6,000 individual correspondents—among the most important composers, arrangers, singers, conductors, scholars, writers and world leaders of the 20th century), manuscripts, biographical materials, journals, contracts, programs, awards, honorary degrees, memorabilia, fan mail scrapbooks, photographs (more than 4,400), speeches, recordings, and items from her family, among other materials.9
Her music library contains more than 2,000 printed scores, also more than 2,000 songs in manuscript, including many by African-American composers (especially Florence Price, Hall Johnson, Will Marion Cook, Harry T. Burleigh, William Dawson, R. Nathaniel Dett, William Grant Still, among others). Women make up approximately one third of the composers who sent manuscripts to Miss Anderson.9
Although Miss Anderson was at the center of a racial/political conflict, resulting in her historic outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday in 1939 (well documented with over 2,000 letters from her fans), she was not inclined to write about her personal feelings or to analyze some of the issues, including race, about which she constantly was asked.9 Few of her letters expressed her feelings on religion, love, or racial politics.9
Altogether, the collection is a marvel, immaculately maintained, with controlled access, and a well informed, cordial staff. A complete description of the Marian Anderson Papers is viewable online. Several aspects of the collection are viewable in their entirety on the Web (including her enormous photograph collection). I highly recommend it.
9– All voice teachers should consider singing spirituals on their programs and use such performances as excellent educational opportunities to bring attention to the current state of the spiritual. Be courageous. Breech the gap separating whites from spirituals, mindful that this is a major point of fear and historical contention. A performer prepared with information and understanding can do it. Allow each performance to be part of a conscious effort to reconcile the division in our performing traditions. In the end, a voice teacher’s example is the positive light students will follow.
10– Read several slave narrative accounts for an informed perspective. Slave narratives are invaluable to the spiritual singer. These primary testimonies are filled with numerous details of slave life. Historians estimate that there are approximately 6,000 published narratives by African-American slaves, spanning 170 years of testimony, from book-length autobiographies to short newspaper accounts and interviews.9 Many are contained in modern anthologies, like the important collection edited by Yale University history professor John Blassingame. His book, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies, the largest modern collection of slave narratives, contains first-person accounts about culture, plantation life, sexual exploitation and psychological responses to bondage.9 These important eyewitness accounts are provided by a variety of persons: house and field servants; slaves docile and rebellious; urban and rural slaves.9
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., director of African-American Studies at Harvard University, insists that authentic slave narratives are of great significance, since African-American slaves were among the only enslaved people in the world to produce a body of writing that testified to their experiences.9 Perhaps the most famous of the narratives is that written by fugitive slave Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, 1845.9
With the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the American Civil War in 1865 brought freedom to more than four million slaves. Nearly 100,000 of these former slaves were still alive 70 years later in the period of the Great Depression.9 During the Depression, the Work Projects Administration, through its Federal Writers Project, recorded interviews with more than 2,400 of these former slaves about their life experiences under the institution of slavery.
HBO Documentaries, in association with the Library of Congress, produced a 74-minute film based on sections of the slave narrative collection readings, supplemented with archival photographs, music and period images.9 Whoopi Goldberg narrated the film, which includes excerpts from dramatic narratives read by noted African-American actors Angela Bassett, Michael Boatman, Roscoe Lee Browne, Don Cheadle, Sandra Daley, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Guillaume, Jasmine Guy, Samuel L. Jackson, CCH Pounder, LaTanya Richardson, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Roger Guenveur Smith, Courtney B. Vance, Vanessa L. Williams, Oprah Winfrey, and Alfre Woodard. The book, a multi-linked interactive website,9 videotapes and DVDs are available. The website also has a link with Questia’s slave narrative resources.9 Questia is noted as the world’s largest online library.
11– Consider the poetry of the Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Era as useful supplements. This poetry could be useful to connect the suppressed and veiled messages of slaves in spirituals by tracing it through the oppressed lives of their descendants in the next generations. What slaves possibly felt and were unable to sing or say directly resonates within the thoughts of their descendants. Their words illuminate the timeless complexities of oppression, its permutations, and the fragile, universal dream that is freedom, and all resilient movements toward it.
Teamed with a historian or narrator, one could create a moving program of music and the spoken word. Here is a short list of poets to consider: Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Calvin Hernton, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Naomi Long Madgett, Haki R. Madhubuti, Claude McKay, Ismael Reed, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, Alice Walker, Margaret Walker, and Richard Wright. There are many others. Two great anthologies of African-American poetry are very useful: Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry, edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.; In Search for Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry, edited by Ethelbert Miller.
12– Consider online sources for materials about spirituals and performance practice. Here is a short list of current websites dedicated to spirituals and their performance.
Internet Websites Dedicated to African-American Spirituals
African American Art Song Alliance
http://www.afrovoices.com/index.html
African-American Spirituals http://gigue.peabody.jhu.edu/~jstuckey/spirit.html#History
Africans in America http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/home.html
Afro-Centric Voices in Classical Music
http://www.afrovoices.com/index.html
(Bibliography)
http://www.afrovoices.com/bookstore/author.html
Art of The Negro Spiritual
http://www.artofthenegrospiritual.com/index.html
Center of Black Music Research, “Negro Spirituals and Gospel Songs: Indexes to Selected Periodicals,” by Robert Sacré http://www.cbmr.org/pubs/bmrjback.htm
EdSiteMent-Spirituals http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?ID=318
Glimpses Issue #89 “Slave Songs Transcends Sorrow”
http://www.gospelcom.net/chi/GLIMPSEF/Glimpses/glmps089.shtml
Marian Anderson: A Life in Song http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/anderson/
Negro Spiritual Quarterly, The http://www.dogonvillage.com/negrospirituals/
Negro Spiritual (Thomas Wentworth Higginson Article in The Atlantic Monthly, 1867)
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/1867jun/spirit.htm
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TWH/twh_front.html
Official Site of History of Negro Spirituals
http://www.negrospirituals.com/
Penn State Annual Celebration of Spirituals
http://www.artsandarchitecture.psu.edu/news/
spirituals_012903.html
Questia’s Online Spiritual Resources http://www.questia.com/popularSearches/spirituals.jsp
Reference Materials on Spirituals & Partial Discography http://www.ymbarnwell.com/Spirituals.htm
Spiritual And The Blues
http://www.nathanielturner.com/
spiritualandblues.htm
Spirituals: A Research Bibliography (The North Star)
http://northstar.vassar.edu/volume1/
v1n2bib.html
;pirituals Project, The http://www.spiritualsproject.org/
A survey featured on the Art of the Negro Spiritual website, organized by Randye L. Jones +ww.artofthenegrospiritual.com/ survey.html, is an important online source. Its goal is to obtain the views of vocal students, professional singers, voice teachers and vocal enthusiasts on the challenges of studying and singing Negro spiritual settings for the solo voice.
Other hopeful anecdotal signs are taking place in the solo vocal world. For example, recently I spoke with a white, young, professional, solo vocalist in Philadelphia, who tells the tale that his African-American voice teacher made a significant impact on his understanding, appreciation and performance of spirituals. His teacher’s instruction and example greatly enhanced his learning experience. Through his teacher, he gained a degree of comfort with dialect and the elements of improvised style. He felt comfortable, supported, and encouraged to try the history and material. Now he sings spirituals with authority and authenticity. I believe his learning experience is not an isolated one.
Spirituals are part of the solo vocal competition scene as well. The American Negro Spiritual Festival, which showcased college choirs and their soloists in competition in Cincinnati for many years, is inactive at this time. However, the American Traditions Competition (Savannah, Ga.), now in its tenth year, is a premiere solo vocal competition devoted to the musical heritage of the United States.9 The competitors’ 15-20 minute program selections cover a wide spectrum of American music, ranging from Broadway show tunes to jazz to spirituals. A spiritual may be sung as part of the preliminary, quarter, and final competition phases. As part of the program requirements of the semi-final round, contestants are required to sing an American spiritual.9 Spirituals also are an important element of the Leontyne Price Vocal Arts Competition, and the Marian Anderson Guild’s Music Competition of the National Association of Negro Musicians.
Another hopeful anecdotal sign points to the tendency of some major, white, American, solo vocalists to sing spirituals abroad, which possibly suggests a sense of freedom to sing the literature in a less judgmental atmosphere. We should encourage our artists to bring their performances home.
Conclusion
“African-American spirituals are important literature for all singers. By giving up our silence, and moving into dialog and performance of African-American spirituals, we get so much more in generous return for the nation and ourselves. Hall Johnson’s words on what the spiritual gives to the singer and listener speaks volumes to our heart.
“. . . in direct proportion as these songs are delivered with simplicity, even with reverence, each song being allowed to speak for itself, the singer will find his audience-reaction more and more gratifying and himself vastly enriched by the experience. 9”
Also, we can reclaim spirituals as a great resource in transforming our nation and ourselves. 9 Lovell, Cone, Jones and Paul Robeson understood and reclaimed the spirituals as perhaps they were meant to be: songs of powerful motivation, determination, and inspiration that sustained African-Americans through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow segregation; songs of power and action that moved this nation through its second revolution—the civil rights revolution; songs of conscience and transformation waiting to bring us to that place where we need to be—together.
Dr. Lourin Plant is a music professor at Rowan University (Glassboro, N.J.), where he has served as coordinator of the vocal/choral division. He is a member of the National Association of Negro Musicians (Marian Anderson Guild), ACDA, and the Opera Company of Philadelphia.
9Moses Hogan, ed., The Oxford Book of Spirituals (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
9Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, Connecticut: Preager Publishers, 1996), 104.
9Ibid., 93.
9 Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 333.
9Ibid.
9CJ Williamson, “Discrimination’s Ugly Scab,” Classical Singer, February 2002, 6.
9PBS SPECIAL/WGHB American Experience Stephen Foster website (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy.html).
9Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions: Black People in White Minds. (California Newsreel, 1987), Videocassette.
9 Arthur C. Jones, Wade in The Water: The Wisdom of the Spirituals (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1993), xi.
9Hall Johnson, Thirty Spirituals Arranged for Voice and Piano (New York and London: G. Schirmer, 1949), 4.
9Jones, xvi
9John Lovell, Jr., Black Song: The Forge and the Flame—The Story of How The Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1972).
9Ibid., 310.
9Ibid.
9Jones, 23 and 32.
9Joseph E. Holoway and Winifred K. Vass, The African Heritage of American English (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), xix.
9Allan Metcalf, American Regional English Today: A Talking Tour of American English (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000), 160.
9J. A. Harrison, “Negro English,” in Perspectives on Black English, ed. Joey Lee Dillard (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 154.
9Ibid.
9Ibid., 155.
9Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghfton Mifflin Co., 2000), 12.
9Ibid.
9Hall Johnson, 4.
9Ibid.
9Ibid., 4-5.
9Ibid., 5.
9Hall Johnson, 4.
9Ibid.
9Penn Special Collections-MA Register 3 (Scope and Content Note) (http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/mms/anderson/anderson.html).
9Ibid.
9Ibid.
9Ibid.
9Lisa Clayton Robinson, § “Slave Narratives,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 1718.
9John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), notes.
9Ibid.
9Robinson, “Slave Narratives.”
9The Frederick Douglass Autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, in The Classic Anthology of Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2002), 323-436.
9HBO Documentaries: About the Film
(http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/unchained_memories/about.html).
9Ibid.
9HBO Documentaries—Unchained Memories: Readings From The Slave Narratives (http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/unchained_memories/index.html).
9“Slave Narratives,” in Questia’s On-Line Library (http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp?CRID=slave_narratives&OFFID=se1).
9Savannah Onstage International Arts Festival: American Traditions Repertoire Requirements, 2001, from http://www.savannahonstage.org/ametra_repreq.html
9Ibid.
9Hall Johnson, 5.
9Jones, x.
