The AfroAmer sacred song (negro spiritulas-gospel) tradition appreciation and it's impact thread

[IllmaticDelta]

This is the sister thread to the Blues thread (Blues and Gospel are close cousins in many ways) I made here-->
“The blues are the roots, everything else is the fruits” -- Willie Dixon



You're welcome to post your fav songs

Some of the pages are missing

 

[IllmaticDelta]

An Analysis of the Message of the Negro Spirituals…

The music had its origin on shores distant from the land where its people eventually came to dwell for generations. They were stripped physically and metaphorically of their native trappings. Those who survived what came to be called the “Middle Passage,” would have to build community among people from disparate tribes. Although the languages were different and the religious customs varied, it was the music and the inherent sense of community that would be reinforced and would help to keep the hope of freedom forever alive.

Work songs, sorrow songs, laments, moans and chants; the musical genre that has come to be known as the Negro Spiritual emanated from the folk song of the enslaved African. Once thought to be simple expressions of Christian faith from an illiterate people, objective scholarship over the years has come to understand the Spiritual as more than that. Although composed and formed on the shores of the New World, the music has definite African roots. Wyatt Tee Walker writes, “Wherever the Africans and their progeny touched New World shores, no matter what the condition of their existence, they maintained their musical identity. The rhythm forms and musical idioms were kept alive through the desperate need of the Africans for humanness, which the slave system forcibly stripped from them” (Walker 48, 29). The American slave system was brutal, oppressive and dehumanizing. Although many freedoms were lost the enslaved African retained the freedom to think and thereby was able to develop a longing for freedom and liberation from bondage, providing the foundation from which they would hope for and look forward to a better day. This message, as communicated in selected Spirituals, is analyzed in the context of Jürgen Moltmann’s concept of hope.

How does the theology of a 20th century German theologian intersect with the message of hope found in songs created by enslaved Africans during the antebellum period of American history? Moltmann places hope within the framework of Christian eschatology which is the doctrine of last things or the culmination of history – usually associated with the second coming of Jesus Christ. Moltmann reiterates this usual understanding of eschatology but does not leave it in the realm of events that will happen at the end of history. Moltmann believes that relegating these events to the ‘last day’ robs them of what he calls their directive, uplifting and critical significance for all the days which are in the present. This hope begins with a definite historical reality – the resurrection of Jesus. Moltmann writes:

Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but also the protest of the divine promise against suffering… [F]aith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. (Theology Hope 21)

Hope then becomes a double-edged sword; it brings consolation in the midst of oppressive circumstances, but it also causes those oppressed to yearn for better than what they are presently experiencing. For the enslaved African, the unrest came in knowing that things should be different; that God did not want them to be slaves and treated in an inhumane manner. In this context hope becomes the impetus to bring about necessary change because, again quoting Moltmann, it “takes seriously the possibilities with which all reality is fraught”



What survives from the antebellum period of American history regarding African Americans is the song. This is why the Spiritual serves as the source for discovering the message of hope that the enslaved Africans were able to maintain in order to not only survive the ordeal of slavery but also to thrive and carve out a place for themselves in what would become their home. The foundations of life, religion and culture that were part of the African heritage helped to sustain the captive African in his captivity. In the inhumane circumstance of slavery, the African did not abandon his identity or sense of self. James Cone says of the spirituals: “The basic idea of the spirituals is that slavery contradicts God; it is a denial of God’s will. To be enslaved is to be declared nobody and that form of existence contradicts God’s creation of people to be God’s children. Because black people believed that they were God’s children, they affirmed their somebodiness, refusing to reconcile their servitude with divine revelation…They contended that God willed their freedom and not their slavery” (Cone 33).

It is a mistake to label the Spiritual as strictly religious music. There is a social or political aspect to it. However, in order to see this in the Spirituals we need to understand that in the context of African traditional religion and culture, there is not a separation of the sacred and secular, the religious from everyday life; they are interconnected. So when we hear a Spiritual that speaks of freedom such as “Oh Freedom” or the “Gospel Train,” it is not just an otherworldly freedom. When these songs were sung in meetings, those assembled were looking to the possibility of freedom in the present. Howard Thurman writes:

“The existence of these songs is itself a monument to one of the most striking instances on record in which a people forged a weapon of offence and defence (sic) out of a psychological shackle. By some amazing, but vastly creative spiritual insight, the slave undertook the redemption of a religion that the master had profaned in his midst” (Thurman 17).

And additionally from James Cone: “The slave songs reveal the social consciousness of blacks who refused to accept white limitations placed on their lives… the spirituals were the slave’s description and criticism of his environment and the key to his revolutionary sentiments and his desire to fly to free territory” (Cone 14).

There were laws enacted against singing some of these songs because of the ideas contained in them. A song such as “Oh Freedom” implies the possibility of rebellion:

Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me my Lord

And before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave

And go home to my Lord and be free. [1]

Listen: Oh Freedom



The line “before I be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave,” conveys the idea of fighting or participating in armed rebellion in order to achieve liberation.

Another song, which is based on the Old Testament Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt, is one of many in the style of call and response, a retention of an Africanism which is found in the Spirituals. The leader sings a line and the rest of the members of the group respond with a repeated line. “Go Down Moses” is just such a song. The repeated line is “Let my people go” which would be sung by all members of the group. Imagine this song being sung in secret by a group of people who believe that the possibility of their freedom not only should but could happen at any time. Also, as you listen consider why such a song would be deemed as dangerous.


Go down, Moses/’Way down in Egypt Land,

Tell Ole Pharaoh To Let My People Go


When Israel was in Egypt’s land/Let My People Go

Oppressed so hard they could not stand/Let My People Go


Thus said the Lord bold Moses said/Let My People Go

If not I’ll smite your first born dead/Let My People Go

Listen: Go Down Moses



Some think this was the first of the Spirituals to be written down; others that it was written to honor Nat Turner’s slave revolt. Either way, this was the song of a people who longed for freedom, not just in death but held out hope for freedom in this present life.

All this is not to say that the sorrow of present circumstance was not acknowledged. Community was very important in African cultural heritage and remained so in the midst of slavery because they only had each other to count on in many areas of life: work and basic survival. Escapes depended on the cooperation of others in the community. It was within a group meeting that one could sing the following and know that there were others who understood and could acknowledge the same sense of loss.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child/Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child/A long ways from home True believer

A long ways from home.


Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone/ Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone

Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone A long ways from home True believer

A long ways from home.

Listen: Motherless Child



By sharing the song with the group, the singer acknowledges his condition and in vocalizing the situation shares it. Death and separation from children and other family members was a constant specter which overshadowed the slave community and was jointly felt. It is in sharing these feelings with the community the singer is then no longer alone and he/she receives support of the community.

Even in the midst of the horrific circumstance of slavery there was comfort found within their faith. This was not a passive acceptance but a realization that although physical comfort may be lacking, inner comfort and peace was found in knowing God cared and that just as God acted in history with the Israelites so God would eventually act on behalf of the enslaved African. The prophet asks in Jeremiah 8:22, “is there no balm in Gilead?” And the response is:

There is a balm, in Gilead to make the wounded whole

There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.


Sometimes I feel discouraged and think my work’s in vain

But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again


There is a balm, in Gilead to make the wounded whole

There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.

Gilead



The Spiritual answers, yes there is a balm, comfort, and it can “heal the sin sick soul.” It tells us we can, according to Howard Thurman, “continue to hope against all evidence to the contrary because hope is fed by a conviction deeper than the process of thought…” (Thurman Deep River 30).

Yet, even in the inner peace and comfort there was still the unrest and hope for freedom, not in death but in the present. This is evidenced in a song that asks a question that might be framed by a theologian.

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel/An’ why not every man?


He delivered Daniel f’om the lion’s den/Jonah from the belly of the whale,

An de Hebrew chillum f’om de fiery furnace, An’ why not every man?


Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?

Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel/An’ why not every man?

Daniel



What ideas in the Bible are universal? Was freedom from oppression only for the people of Israel or did God intend for the idea of liberation to extend to all those who found themselves in bondage? If God worked to bring about freedom in the lives of individuals and communities in the Bible, does He not still do the same throughout history? Yes, God continues to work, and since this is true, redemption and freedom will come to us who are now enslaved.

One song almost universally listed in literature that has to do with the Spiritual in relation to its religious, political and hidden message is “Steal Away.” This song was sung for a variety of purposes: to call the community to a gathering, social or religious; or to cover or signal the escape of a member of the community.

Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus/ Steal away, steal away home,

I ain’t got long to stay here.


My Lord, He calls me,/ He calls me by the thunder

The trumpet sounds within-a my soul

I ain’t got long to stay here.


My Lord, He calls me,/ He calls me by the lightning

The trumpet sounds within-a my soul

I ain’t got long to stay here.

Steal Away



The Spirituals point to the hope of freedom from physical and mental bondage. William E. B. Dubois writes: “Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things” (186). Just as the soul is freed from the bondage of sin, so should the body should be free in this life from the shackles imposed by others. Moltmann’s idea of the rest and unrest of the heart which hope produces can be found in the Spirituals. Within the realm of the Black experience Moltmann writes: “From the black perspective, Christian hopes mean participating in the world and making it what it ought to be” (Experiences 214). For the enslaved African this meant a release from bondage and acknowledgment of his humanity. This is the dynamic aspect of hope found in Moltmann’s theology and in the message of the Negro Spirituals.

http://coastlinejournal.org/2010/07/07/an-analysis-of-the-message-of-the-negro-spirituals-within-the-context-of-jurgen-moltmann’s-theology-of-hope/

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Negro Spirutuals and it's later offshoot, Gospel were influenced by African vocal and performance styles.

Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. describes these components

as the characterizing and foundational elements of African-American music: calls, cries and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand-clapping, foot-patting and approximations thereof; apart playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...39832&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&uid=70






There are many old descriptions from whites and middle class blacks on it:

A Historical Perspective on Teaching Controversial Aspects of African-American Music

Although many examples can be found in the literature that link contemporary African-American music with the past, two will suffice to demonstrate the possibilities. The first pertains to the music of the folk-oriented black church, the oldest institution owned by the African-American community. Within that tradition, the earliest repertory of sacred song is black hymnody (called variously Baptist “lined-out hymns,” “lining hymn,” or “Dr. Watts”), which can still be heard in folk-oriented black churches across the United States today. This practice dates from the colonial era when some slaves were converted to the Protestant religion of their masters. Never fully assimilated into mainstream colonial American life, these slaves created a folk style of religious expression by superimposing African tribal rituals and traditions upon European-American Protestantism (Du Bois, Negro Church 5). Several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans commented about the distinctiveness of the religious observances of early African Christians in America. The influential clergyman John Leland, a standard bearer for early Baptists in America, remarked in his Virginia Chronicle (1790) that



They [the slaves] are remarkable for learning a tune soon, and have very melodious voices … When religion is lively they are remarkably fond of meeting together, to sing, pray, and exhort, and sometimes preach, and seem to be unwearied in the exercise. … They commonly are more noisy in time of preaching, than the whites, and are more subject to bodily exercise, and if they meet with encouragement in these things, they often grow extravagant.” (qtd. in Green 98)

http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume6-issue2/sam/wright.html

 

[IllmaticDelta]

African Culture in America

When Africans arrived as slaves in America, they brought a culture endowed with many traditions foreign to their European captors. Their rituals for worshiping African gods and celebrating ancestors, death, and holidays, for example, displayed features uncommon to Western culture. Most noticeable among African practices was the prominent tie of music and movement. The description of a ritual for a dying woman, recorded by the daughter of a Virginia planter in her Plantation Reminiscences (n.d.), illustrates the centrality of these cultural expressions and the preservation of African traditions in slave culture:

Several days before her death … [h]er room was crowded with Negroes who had come to perform their religious rites around the death bed. Joining hands they performed a savage dance, shouting wildly around her bed. Although [Aunt Fanny was] an intelligent woman, she seemed to cling to the superstitions of her race.

After the savage dance and rites were over … I went, and said to her: "… we are afraid the noise [singing] and dancing have made you worse."

Speaking feebly, she replied: "Honey, that kind of religion suits us black folks better than your kind. What suits Mars Charles' mind, don't suit mine." (Epstein 1977, p. 130)

Slaveholders and missionaries assumed that exposure to Euro-American cultural traditions would encourage slaves to abandon their African way of life. For some slaves, particularly those who were in constant contact with whites through work and leisure activities, such was the case. The majority of slaves, however, systematically resisted cultural imprisonment by reinterpreting European traditions through an African lens. A description of the slaves' celebration of Pinkster Day, a holiday of Dutch origin, illustrates how the event was transformed into an African-style festival characterized by dancing, drumming, and singing. Dr. James Eights, an observer of this celebration in the late 1700s, noted that the principal instrument accompanying the dancing was an eel-pot drum. This kettle-shaped drum consisted of a wide, single head covered with sheepskin. Over the rhythms the drummer repeated "hi-a-bomba, bomba, bomba."

These vocal sounds were readily taken up and as oft repeated by the female portion of the spectators not otherwise engaged in the exercises of the scene, accompanied by the beating of time with their ungloved hands, in strict accordance with the eel-pot melody.

Merrily now the dance moved on, and briskly twirled the lads and lasses over the well trampled green sward; loud and more quickly swelled the sounds of music to the ear, as the excited movements increased in energy and action. (Eights [1867], reprinted in Southern 1983, pp. 45–46)

The physical detachment of African Americans from Africa and the widespread disappearance of many original African musical artifacts did not prevent Africans and their descendants from creating, interpreting, and experiencing music from an African perspective. Relegated to the status of slaves in America, Africans continued to perform songs of the past. They also created new musical forms and reinterpreted those of European cultures using the vocabulary, idiom, and aesthetic principles of African traditions. The earliest indigenous musical form created within the American context was known as the Negro spiritual.

The Evolution of Negro Spirituals
The original form of the Negro spiritual emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. Later known as the folk spiritual, it was a form of expression that arose within a religious context and through black people's resistance to cultural subjugation by the larger society. When missionaries introduced blacks to Christianity in systematic fashion (c. 1740s), slaves brought relevance to the instruction by reinterpreting Protestant ideals through an African prism. Negro spirituals, therefore, symbolize a unique religious expression, a black cultural identity and worldview that is illustrated in the religious and secular meanings that spirituals often held—a feature often referred to as double entendre.

Many texts found in Negro spirituals compare the slave's worldly oppression to the persecution and suffering of Jesus Christ. Others protest their bondage, as in the familiar lines "Befor' I'd be a slave, I'd be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free." A large body of spiritual texts is laced with coded language that can be interpreted accurately only through an evaluation of the performance context. For example, a spiritual such as the one cited below could have been sung by slaves to organize clandestine meetings and plan escapes:

If you want to find Jesus, go in the wilderness, Mournin' brudder,
You want to find Jesus, go into the wilderness,
I wait upon de Lord, I wait upon de Lord,
I wait upon de Lord, my God, Who take away de sin of de world.

The text of this song provided instructions for slaves to escape from bondage: "Jesus" was the word for "freedom"; "wilderness" identified the meeting place; "de Lord" referred to the person who would lead slaves through the Underground Railroad or a secret route into the North (the land of freedom). This and other coded texts were incomprehensible to missionaries, planters, and other whites, who interpreted them as "meaningless and disjointed affirmations."

The folk spiritual tradition draws from two basic sources: African-derived songs and the Protestant repertory of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Missionaries introduced blacks to Protestant traditions through Christian instruction, anticipating that these songs would replace those of African origin, which they referred to as "extravagant and nonsensical chants, and catches" (Epstein 1977, pp. 61–98). When slaves and free blacks worshiped with whites, they were expected to adhere to prescribed Euro-American norms. Therefore, blacks did not develop a distinct body of religious music until they gained religious autonomy.

When blacks were permitted to lead their own religious services, many transformed the worship into an African-inspired ritual of which singing was an integral part. The Reverend Robert Mallard described the character of this ritual, which he observed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1859:

I stood at the door and looked in—and such confusion of sights and sounds! … Some were standing, others sitting, others moving from one seat to another, several exhorting along the aisles. The whole congregation kept up one monotonous strain, interrupted by various sounds: groans and screams and clapping of hands. One woman especially under the influence of the excitement went across the church in a quick succession of leaps: now [on] her knees … then up again; now with her arms about some brother or sister, and again tossing them wildly in the air and clapping her hands together and accompanying the whole by a series of short, sharp shrieks. (Myers 1972, pp. 482–483)

During these rituals slaves not only sang their own African-derived songs but reinterpreted European psalms and hymns as well.

An English musician, whose tour of the United States from 1833 to 1841 included a visit to a black church in Vicksburg, Virginia, described how slaves altered the original character of a psalm:

When the minister gave out his own version of the Psalm, the choir commenced singing so rapidly that the original tune absolutely ceased to exist—in fact, the fine old psalm tune became thoroughly transformed into a kind of negro melody; and so sudden was the transformation, by accelerating the time. (Russell 1895, pp. 84–85)

In 1853 the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted encountered a similar situation, witnessing a hymn change into a "confused wild kind of chant" (Olmsted 1904). The original tunes became unrecognizable because blacks altered the structure, melody, rhythm, and tempo in accordance with African aesthetic principles.

The clergy objected not only to such altered renditions of Protestant songs but also to songs created independently. John Watson, a white Methodist minister, referred to the latter as "short scraps of disjointed affirmations, pledges or prayers, lengthened out with long repetitive choruses." The rhythmic bodily movements that accompanied the singing caused even more concern among the clergy:

With every word so sung, they have a sinking of one or other leg of the body alternately, producing an audible sound of the feet at every step…. If some in the meantime sit, they strike the sounds alternately on each thigh. What in the name of religion, can countenance or tolerate such gross perversions of true religion! (Watson [1819] in Southern 1983, p. 63)

As they had long done in African traditions, audible physical gestures provided the rhythmic foundation for singing.

The slaves' interpretation of standard Christian doctrine and musical practice demonstrated their refusal to abandon their cultural values for those of their masters and the missionaries. Undergirding the slaves' independent worship services were African values that emphasized group participation and free expression. These principles govern the features of the folk spiritual tradition: (1) communal composition; (2) call-response; (3) repetitive choruses; (4) improvised melodies and texts; (5) extensive melodic ornamentation (slurs, bends, shouts, moans, groans, cries); (6) heterophonic (individually varied) group singing; (7) complex rhythmic structures; and (8) the integration of song and bodily movement.

The call-response structure promotes both individual expression and group participation. The soloist, who presents the call, is free to improvise on the melody and text; the congregation provides a fixed response. Repetitive chorus lines also encourage group participation. Melodic ornamentation enables singers to embellish and thus intensify performances. Clapped and stamped rhythmic patterns create layered metrical structures as a foundation for gestures and dance movements.

Folk spirituals were also commonplace among many free blacks who attended independent African-American churches in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These blacks expressed their racial pride by consciously rejecting control and cultural domination by the affiliated white church. Richard Allen, founder of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Philadelphia in 1794, was the first African-American minister of an independent black church to alter the cultural style of Protestant worship so that it would have greater appeal for his black congregation.

Recognizing the importance of music, Allen chose to compile his own hymnal rather than use the standard one for Methodist worship (which contained no music). The second edition of this hymnal, A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors, by Richard Allen, Minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1801), contains some of Allen's original song texts, as well as other hymns favored by his congregation. To some of these hymns Allen added refrain lines and choruses to the typical stanza or verse form to ensure full congregational participation in the singing. Allen's congregation performed these songs in the style of folk spirituals, which generated much criticism from white Methodist ministers. Despite such objections, other AME churches adopted the musical practices established at Bethel.

In the 1840s, Daniel A. Payne, an AME minister who later became a bishop, campaigned to change the church's folk-style character. A former Presbyterian pastor educated in a white Lutheran seminary, Payne subscribed to the Euro-American view of the "right, fit, and proper way of serving God" (Payne [1888] in Southern 1983, p. 69). Therefore, he restructured the AME service to conform to the doctrines, literature, and musical practices of white elite churches. Payne introduced Western choral literature performed by a trained choir and instrumental music played by an organist. These forms replaced the congregational singing of folk spirituals, which Payne labeled "cornfield ditties." While some independent urban black churches adopted Payne's initiatives, discontented members left to join other churches or establish their own. However, the majority of the AME churches, especially those in the South, denounced Payne's "improvements" and continued their folk-style worship.

Payne and his black counterparts affiliated with other AME and with Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches, represented an emerging black educated elite that demonstrated little if any tolerance for religious practices contrary to Euro-American Christian ideals of "reverence" and "refinement." Their training in white seminaries shaped their perspective on an "appropriate" style of worship. In the Protestant Episcopal Church, for example, a southern white member noted that these black leaders "were accustomed to use no other worship than the regular course prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer, for the day. Hymns, or Psalms out of the same book were sung, and printed sermon read…. No extemporary ad dress, exhortation, or prayer, was permitted, or used" (Epstein 1977, p. 196). Seminary-trained black ministers rejected traditional practices of black folk churches because they did not conform to aesthetic principles associated with written traditions. Sermons read from the written script, musical performances that strictly adhered to the printed score, and the notion of reserved behavior marked those religious practices considered most characteristic and appropriate within Euro-American liturgical worship.

In contrast, practices associated with the black folk church epitomize an oral tradition. Improvised sermons, prayers, testimonies, and singing, together with demonstrative behavior, preserve the African values of spontaneity and communal interaction.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3444700891/music-united-states.html

 

[IllmaticDelta]

What yall know about the African influence and reinterpretation of Christianity by the slaves in America?

African American Christianity, Pt. I:
To the Civil War

The story of African-American religion is a tale of variety and creative fusion. Enslaved Africans transported to the New World beginning in the fifteenth century brought with them a wide range of local religious beliefs and practices. This diversity reflected the many cultures and linguistic groups from which they had come. The majority came from the West Coast of Africa, but even within this area religious traditions varied greatly. Islam had also exerted a powerful presence in Africa for several centuries before the start of the slave trade: an estimated twenty percent of enslaved people were practicing Muslims, and some retained elements of their practices and beliefs well into the nineteenth century. Catholicism had even established a presence in areas of Africa by the sixteenth century.

UVA Lib.
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Funeral in Guinea, west Africa, drawn by a French painter, ca. 1789 (detail)

UVA Lib.
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"Heathen practices in funerals," drawn by a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, ca. 1840 (detail)

Preserving African religions in North America proved to be very difficult. The harsh circumstances under which most slaves lived—high death rates, the separation of families and tribal groups, and the concerted effort of white owners to eradicate "heathen" (or non-Christian) customs—rendered the preservation of religious traditions difficult and often unsuccessful. Isolated songs, rhythms, movements, and beliefs in the curative powers of roots and the efficacy of a world of spirits and ancestors did survive well into the nineteenth century. But these increasingly were combined in creative ways with the various forms of Christianity to which Europeans and Americans introduced African slaves. In Latin America, where Catholicism was most prevalent, slaves mixed African beliefs and practices with Catholic rituals and theology, resulting in the formation of entirely new religions such as vaudou in Haiti (later referred to as "voodoo"), Santeria in Cuba, and Candomblé in Brazil. But in North America, slaves came into contact with the growing number of Protestant evangelical preachers, many of whom actively sought the conversion of African Americans.

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Slaves baptized in a Moravian congregation, drawing entitled "Excorcism-Baptism of the Negroes" in a German history of the Moravians (United Brethren) in Pennsylvania, 1757 (detail)

Religion and Slavery

In the decades after the American Revolution, northern states gradually began to abolish slavery, and thus sharper differences emerged in the following years between the experiences of enslaved peoples and those who were now relatively free. By 1810 the slave trade to the United States also came to an end and the slave population began to increase naturally, making way for the preservation and transmission of religious practices that were, by this time, truly "African-American."

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UVA Lib.

Slave preaching on a cotton plantation near Port Royal, South Carolina, engraving in The Illustrated London News, 5 Dec. 1863
On Secret Religious Meetings
"A Negro preacher delivered sermons on the plantation. Services being held in the church used by whites after their services on Sunday. The preacher must always act as a peacemaker and mouthpiece for the master, so they were told to be subservient to their masters in order to enter the Kingdom of God. But the slaves held secret meetings and had praying grounds where they met a few at a time to pray for better things." Harriet Gresham, born a slave in 1838 in South Carolina, as reported by her interviewer, ca. 1935


"[The plantation owner] would not permit them to hold religious meetings or any other kinds of meetings, but they frequently met in secret to conduct religious services. When they were caught, the 'instigators'—known or suspected—were severely flogged. Charlotte recalls how her oldest brother was whipped to death for taking part in one of the religious ceremonies. This cruel act halted the secret religious services." Charlotte Martin, born a slave in 1854 in Florida, as reported by her interviewer, 1936


"Tom Ashbie's [plantation owner] father went to one of the cabins late at night, the slaves were having a secret prayer meeting. He heard one slave ask God to change the heart of his master and deliver him from slavery so that he may enjoy freedom. Before the next day the man disappeared . . . When old man Ashbie died, just before he died he told the white Baptist minister, that he had killed Zeek for praying and that he was going to hell." Rev. Silas Jackson, born a slave in 1846 or 1847 in Virginia, as transcribed by his interviewer, 1937
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Julia Cart

A Gullah "praise house," a surviving example of slaves' secret meeting places, and its pastor, Rev. Henderson; St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1995

This transition coincided with the period of intense religious revivalism known as "awakenings." In the southern states increasing numbers of slaves converted to evangelical religions such as the Methodist and Baptist faiths. Many clergy within these denominations actively promoted the idea that all Christians were equal in the sight of god, a message that provided hope and sustenance to the slaves. They also encouraged worship in ways that many Africans found to be similar, or at least adaptable, to African worship patterns, with enthusiastic singing, clapping, dancing, and even spirit-possession. Still, many white owners insisted on slave attendance at white-controlled churches, since they were fearful that if slaves were allowed to worship independently they would ultimately plot rebellion against their owners. It is clear that many blacks saw these white churches, in which ministers promoted obedience to one's master as the highest religious ideal, as a mockery of the "true" Christian message of equality and liberation as they knew it.
In the slave quarters, however, African Americans organized their own "invisible institution." Through signals, passwords, and messages not discernible to whites, they called believers to "hush harbors" where they freely mixed African rhythms, singing, and beliefs with evangelical Christianity. It was here that the spirituals, with their double meanings of religious salvation and freedom from slavery, developed and flourished; and here, too, that black preachers, those who believed that God had called them to speak his Word, polished their "chanted sermons," or rhythmic, intoned style of extemporaneous preaching. Part church, part psychological refuge, and part organizing point for occasional acts of outright rebellion (Nat Turner, whose armed insurrection in Virginia in 1831 resulted in the deaths of scores of white men, women, and children, was a self-styled Baptist preacher), these meetings provided one of the few ways for enslaved African Americans to express and enact their hopes for a better future.

http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/nineteen/nkeyinfo/aareligion.htm


what yall know about the African based frenzy dance known as the "Ring Shout" basically being the origin of "getting the holy ghost" action

Hear that Dembow/reggaeton beat they're beating/stomping out

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

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Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer (born in Winter Park, Florida on July 28, 1935; died in Amherst, Massachusetts, July 21, 2009) was one of the foremost scholars in African-American gospel music.

Dropping some knowledge

 

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One of the hallmarks of Gospel (and Blues) that went into popular music

 

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Blues and Gospel being closely related went on to influence styles like Doo Wop, Soul and Rock n Roll

 

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If you don't know most of the words then (I said most cause it's a few words I found myself mumbling)

 

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One of the key sounds of Black scared music is the piano and this has a strong Blues root.

 

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For the record...

Barrelhouse

A style of piano blues, dating from the early 20th century, which is a simple form of boogie-woogie, in regular 4/4 metre rather than with eight beats to the bar. The term, also used to mean ‘crude’ or ‘rough’, has been incorporated into the titles of tunes associated with the style

The first attempts to define a geographical point of origin for boogie woogie music began in the late 1930s when music historians conducted extensive interviews and compiled oral histories of the oldest living African-Americans and European-Americans likely to have some knowledge or remembrance of where and when they first heard about boogie woogie.

These oral histories produced a broad consensus: boogie woogie piano was first played by African-Americans in Texas in the early 1870s.

Additional investigations reached the conclusion that the music emerged in the Piney Woods of northeast Texas in close proximity to railroad building and the logging camps affiliated with the railroad. In the logging camps, work crews composed of former slaves felled the trees, sawed logs, and made crossties for the rail beds. Often, spur lines were run to the camps so that logs could be hauled out of the woods by steam engine. In or nearby every logging camp was a barrel house.

The earliest and most simplistic form of boogie woogie playing was originally called "fast western" or more loosely "barrelhouse piano." As the music grew more sophisticated and took the name boogie woogie, the word "barrelhouse" came to mean the places where boogie woogie was most likely to be played, a wide variety of disreputable bars, dives, and bawdyhouses. But in the 1870s, a barrel house was just that, a shack where barrels were assembled or stored. Often, the camp overseers would keep a piano in the barrel house to keep the laborers from drifting away at night in search of diversion elsewhere. It was in these barrel houses that the African-American piano players first began to play the piano "like a drum" and make a piano "sound like a train."

Prior to the June 19, 1865, Emancipation Order freeing all slaves in Texas, few Negroes in northeast Texas or anywhere in the South had more than limited access to a piano. Even if permitted access to one on rare occasions, perhaps for church services, there likely were considerable inhibitions that limited the types of musical expression undertaken. But in the early 1870s, a musician with some rudimentary piano skills trying to entertain former slaves now working around the railroad and in the logging camps was free to experiment and invent. In fact, he was under considerable pressure to experiment with new styles of playing. After long, hard days logging and building rail lines, workers wanted and no doubt demanded exciting, energetic music.

This was a unique confluence of factors to occur anywhere in the world, and uniquely they occurred in northeast Texas. At the same time that Negro musicians obtained the freedom to express African musical sensibilities on their instruments, the tranquility and silence of the rural Piney Woods was being broken by the chuffing, rattling, hammering, and syncopated rhythms of the construction and operation of the railroad. These were new sounds that characterized dramatic changes in the world in which these men were working and playing. Naturally, these were the sounds and rhythms the piano players began to incorporate into their music. For example, the eight-beats-to-the-bar of classic boogie woogie is associated with two rotations of a steam engine driver wheel. Suddenly, an entirely new way of playing the piano was established in order to emulate the sounds of the railroad. And any piano player working the barrelhouses around the logging camps and railroads had to be able to play it.

The evidence that this pounding new style of playing first occurred in the Marshall area is overwhelming.

The historical record is clear that three important elements influenced the first boogie woogie style of playing when it emerged in the 1870s. Research by Dr. John Tennison has established that these necessary elements were only present in the Marshall, Texas, area during this period. Those essential elements are the Piney Woods of northeast Texas; African-Americans working in logging camps and railroad construction; and the close proximity of a railroad "hub."

It was the railroad hub that produced the cacophony of sounds the music mimics and made it possible for people who learned the new style to interact with each other, refine and nurture the styles, and transport it in all directions via the trains.

Marshall was by far the most influential and successful city in the Piney Woods and Harrison County had the largest population of African Americans in the state of Texas for most of the latter half of the 19th Century. Marshall was also the only railroad hub in northeast Texas during this period.

The railroad did not "arrive" in Marshall, it "began" here. That is, the railroad did not reach Marshall as an extension of earlier lines from the east. The first train and rails to reach Marshall were brought up the Red River by steamboat and barges to Swanson's Landing on Caddo Lake. Originally chartered as the Texas Western Railroad in 1852, this line, which was one of the earliest in the state of Texas, connected Swanson's Landing to Jonesville to Marshall by 1858. During the Civil War, the rails between Swanson's Landing and Jonesville were removed and used to help connect Marshall to Shreveport, which was then the eastern terminus of the line. The first railroad bridge crossing the Red River at Shreveport was not built until the early 1880s.

Railroad building in northeast Texas began in earnest after the Civil War. In 1872, Marshall became the headquarters of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and the location of its machine shops and rail yards, as this federally chartered company began building lines from Marshall to San Diego, California.

Given the fact that oral histories had consistently established that boogie woogie music arose in the 1870s in association with railroad construction in the Piney Woods, Dr. John Tennison determined that the only railroad hub in the Piney Woods in this period was Marshall, Texas. The only other railroad hub in Texas at that time was in Houston, which was outside of the Piney Woods and whose African American population was dwarfed by that of Harrison County.

Oral histories also indicated that the earliest boogie woogie musicians used the trains to travel between various logging camps within the Piney Woods. The only rail system in existence in the Piney Woods during the 1870s that could have served this role was the T&P, with its numerous tap lines and spurs connecting the logging camps. And Marshall was the hub of the T&P.

Because the Marshall railroad hub was relatively isolated from the rest of the country, instead of being an extension of existing railways, the conditions were in place for African American musical sensibilities to be expressed in ways that were stylistically different from ragtime and jazz.

Boogie woogie was not a refinement of existing styles of music. It was instead a gradual development of an entirely new way of applying African musical sensibilities, including percussive techniques, to the piano and other instruments. The elements that caused this evolution were only present in the Marshall, Texas, area at the time the music emerged. That is why Dr. Tennison, and others, now proclaim that Marshall, Texas is indeed the "Birthplace of boogie woogie."