African American Spirituals

Hello there!

I want you to use your imagination with me for just a moment here. You are an enslaved African American farmer. You have just worked a long hot day on the tobacco plantation. It is getting to be late afternoon, nearly twilight. That is when you hear your friend, whom you know not to be a Christian, starting to sing these words to you…

Let us praise God together on our knees      

Let us praise God together on our knees      

Let us praise God together on our knees

When I fall on my knees 

With my face to the rising sun

Oh, Lord, have mercy on me. 

You look at each other and nod. You know exactly what he is telling you. Later that night you do what he instructed: you go to the revival assembly meeting. There you are met with all of the other Christians on the plantation. You praise God together. You talk about your day. You talk about the plantation and how to help one another. You share bible stories, but most importantly, you sing. 

African American spirituals were the first African American musical contributions in North America. Maybe, like me, you learned about them in grade school. Maybe you also sing them at church in the hymn books. What makes them so prominently special is their innovation in music that they did not intentionally mean to make for the sake of musical progression or theological progression. When we last explored Luther, he was making drastic changes in the Church musically because his theology of the Eucharist did not align with Catholicism. Therefore, he created a whole new system of  music, a whole new system of the mass, and a whole new system of theology to intentionally move forward. African Americans wrote spirituals as an act of faith and as a coping mechanism for an oppressed people. 

That does not mean it was without innovation or without nuances. It surely was a fascinating complex system of communication. For starters, the opening spiritual, “Let us Praise God Together on Our Knees,” is a classic favorite that was popularized after the Civil War to be a communion hymn, but during the early eighteenth century it was used to communicate when the assembly meetings would be convening; they had to be kept a secret since the slave masters banned them in Virginia in 1676.(1) This Spiritual,  at the same time, was a call to have everyone come and worship God together in secret, despite whatever bans their masters placed on them, for they knew that God was worthy of their praise. 

These songs were passed around from plantation to plantation, all across the country. So, many of them developed variations, including the one we see in our example above. The friend sang “Let us praise God together on our knees,” three times instead of the two that we are used to in our hymn books. 

These are just some minor changes they would make. The real magic of the music starts in their theology.

The theology of the African American people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were truly reflected mostly upon the stories of the Hebrew Bible, especially the Exodus. The church music of their masters, on the other hand, expressed both New Testament and Old Testament ideologies on grace from the Baptist and Methodist traditions. These colonists were brought up thinking they were of the lineage of the New Adam and could bring this sense of human achievement into a new land for them, free from religious persecution.(2) It was Israel, the promised land. Ironically, they were fleeing persecution just so they could persecute others. The Exodus expressed a people who were taken from their home and brought into a strange land to be slaves for hundreds of years. The African Americans understood this feeling. The American colonies were not Israel, it was Egypt, a place of bondage. 

This theology of bondage in Egypt seemed very harsh, but it added a very specific dynamic to how they viewed the world and how they viewed God, heaven, and salvation. They realized that God was on their side. God is always on the side of the oppressed. Jesus is also walking with them in pain. They were children of God and God was going to lead them out of bondage. The question to them was not, “Who are we?” but rather, “When will we be liberated?”(3) It was this divine revelation that helped them get through the hard days, affirm their faith, and maintain their hope in a better life in the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God was not the same concept as the white colonialists. Heaven was a liminal space between the present and the future. Heaven was also here on earth with us and up in the sky with God.(4) This realized eschatological theology parallels Orthodoxy, yet they were completely on the other side of the world from them. They adapted this theology through the divine revelation of the Holy Spirit’s presence among them. “The Holy Spirit enabled them to experience the joyful hope of imminent and future liberation by God.”(5)

Their music was able to set them free in expressing this theology, not just in lyric prose, but in traditional African chants and singing, African rhythm. White Colonialist European-American hymns, and story-telling in song. The African Americans that were shipped to the colonies loved to sing. This was seen as far back as the boat trip itself.(6) It was a part of the African culture to sing as part of their everyday lives. In their speeches for large groups, they would blend together song and speech together led by the speaker/song leader known as a griot.(7) The style that the griots sang remained when they came to the colonies. 

They loved to play around with story-telling in song, linking that along with call and response songs. “Go Down Moses” is a great example of this. Above you will see the music notation, but also note that every time the phrase “Let my people go” came to pass, that was sung in response to the griot by everyone. After the verse, everyone would sing the chorus, “Go down Moses, way down to Egypt land, tell ole Pharaoh to let my people go.” Notice also that like other spirituals, this is told as a story in song, but it is not a full recitation of a bible story. 

The other varying tonalities remained as well: natural singing, falsetto, ululation, or guttural sounds.(8) The rhythmic stylings of African music–syncopation and polyrhythm–also remained. Though it is unclear as to what the melodic vocal music sounded like before the Africans can to the colonies, as they started listening to more European hymns, the more they were able to develop an ear to the diatonic major, minor, and pentatonic scales. Why does this all matter? 

Why does it matter that an African American woman working a cotton field would sing a couple songs with guttural sounds sometimes? It is because it is part of their heritage, and part of who they are to do so. African Americans had all the time in the world to sing while working, but were not so lucky to learn how to compose music or to write lyrics. All of these songs were memorized, and then further embellished in improvisation in the moment. They are a type of folk song in the end. Having them add harmony, melismas, grace notes, note bends, turns, hand clapping, and foot stomping were just allowing them to enjoy their time.(9) All based on their culture while uplifting their spirits by reminding themselves with the promises of God, the hopes of freedom, and community.  

Community is why I am here. 

Until next time, 

          Keep Practicing, 

                      Keep Praying, 

                                Suzie

Notes

 1. Miles Mark Fisher, Negro Slave Songs in the United States, Russel & Russel: (New York, NY, 1968), 29. 

2. Lauri Ramey, “The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70, no. 2 (June 2002): 351.

3.Durocher L. Blakey, “Expressing Black Religion in Spirituals,” The A.M.E. Zion Quarterly Review. 47, no. 1 (April 1985): 20.

4.Ramey, “The Theology of the Lyric Tradition in African American Spirituals,” 355.

5.  Blakey, “Expressing Black Religion in Spirituals,” 21.

6. Melva W. Costen, “African American Spirituals,” Journal of Religious & Theological Information, 4, no. 3, 2001, 68.

7. Mark A. Lamport, Benjamin K. Forrest, & Vernon M. Whaley, “Hymns and Hymnody: Historical and Theological Introductions,” Vol. 3, Cascade Books: (Eugene, OR, 2019), 136.

8.Costen, “African American Spirituals,” 69.

9. Costen, “African American Spirituals,” 69.