African American Song

By The Library of Congress

African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States. [1] From slave era field hollers, spirituals, and gospel, to blues, soul, and hip-hop, American musical culture abounds with the influence of African American song.

Americans of African descent include many cultural and regional groups, including early settlers and immigrants from the Caribbean, immigrants from other parts of the Americas, and recent immigrants from African countries. But most African Americans are descendants of Africans who were forcibly brought to America through the slave trade. Early in the colonial era some were treated as indentured servants and freed after a period of time, resulting in a population of free African Americans even in the colonial era, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay region. There was also a significant population of free Blacks in Florida when it became a territory of the United States in 1822, mainly consisting of settlers from the Bahamas, runaway slaves from the Southern United States, and their descendants (see the related article "Bahamian American Song"). In what is now Louisiana, African Americans were brought as slaves during the French and Spanish colonial period or brought in by settlers after the Louisiana Purchase. In later periods free Blacks also emigrated from French speaking areas of the Caribbean. This mix developed into a group of people identified today as "Louisiana Creoles." For more on this topic see the article "French American Song."

An estimated 645,000 Africans were imported into the United States between 1650 and 1808 as slave labor. They came primarily from sub-Saharan Africa's northwestern and middle-western coastal regions and worked under harsh conditions predominantly in the cash crop economy of the rural South.

Songs During the Era of Slavery

The slaves brought musical traditions from Africa with them. Many of their activities, from work to worship, were steeped in song. African Americans accompanied their labor with work songs that often incorporated field hollers – call and response chants tinged with falsetto whoops called "arwhoolies." (Examples of field hollers are available in the "Traditional Work Songs" article.) They also fashioned instruments similar to those they had known in Africa. For example, the modern banjo is a descendent of African banjos.

Because colonists considered indigenous forms of African worship involving drumming and dancing to be idolatrous, the slaves performed their music-infused religious rites in seclusion. The slaves' informal gatherings in praise houses and brush arbor meetings in the eighteenth century involved songs and chants like the ring shout, a shuffling circular dance to chanting and handclapping. Sometimes the participants would enter ecstatic trances.

In the mid- to late 1700s free African Americans began forming religious groups apart from white congregations, organized by people educated by Methodists, Baptists, or the Society of Friends (Quakers), especially in the North. In some cases these efforts culminated in the development of fully independent African American churches. The Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was organized by Richard Allen, a former slave, in 1793. The church that the congregation occupies today was dedicated in 1794. In 1801 Allen published the first hymnal compiled for African American congregations, A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns, Selected From Various Authors. [2] Allen published his own hymn lyrics in other places that resemble some of those in his hymnal. So, in addition to compiling texts of popular hymns used in African American congregations from song sheets and, perhaps, oral tradition, he may have composed some of the lyrics in his hymnal as well. The hymnal includes some examples of what are called "wandering" refrains and choruses that can be used for various hymns, which are an identifiable feature of African American hymns. [3]

Forms of religious song among enslaved African Americans were developed in secret meetings called "camp" or "bush" meetings, as most slave holders in the early slavery period feared that Christianizing slaves might lead to rebellion. After the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, many slave owners felt that Christian teachings might actually help to prevent rebellion by inviting ministers to preach to slaves on topics such as obedience. But the slave's secret religious meetings with their distinctive musical forms continued to be practiced even after this Christianization process had begun. In camp meetings African Americans were free to develop their own shared spirituality with elements of both African cultures and the culture of the region where they now lived. "Ring shouts" were a type of song from the southern tidewater region that used African rhythm and chants performed with a shuffling movement, as dance was not allowed. Examples of this type of group religious expression are rare today. In the Chesapeake Bay region, The Singing and Praying Band keeps their tradition of ring shouts alive by bringing together members of several congregations. They performed at the Library of Congress in 2012. The coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where a dialect of African English called Gullah was spoken, is another place where some of these early songs have been preserved. The McIntosh County Shouters is a group that continues to perform Ring Shouts today and gave a concert at the Library of Congress in 2010.

As Africanized Christianity took hold of the slave population during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, spirituals, a type of religious song typically sung in a call and response form with a leader improvising a line of text and a chorus of singers providing a solid refrain in unison, served as a way to express the community's new faith, as well as its sorrows and hopes. Some spirituals served as codified messages of secret meetings, of protest, or even of an intent to escape. Songs often used Old Testament sources to express the suffering of slavery. For example, the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center archives include recordings of "Samson," a nineteenth century spiritual that uses a biblical story to express anger about bondage. John Avery Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax recorded a performance of the song sung by Deacon Sylvester Johnson of Louisiana in 1939.

Another type of spiritual, often called the "camp meeting song," also developed during this period. These expressed the joy of salvation and called people to worship. Some of these were preserved and passed on in later African American Churches and African American college singing groups. An example of a camp meeting style song preserved in oral tradition is "In That Great Getting Up Morning." This song was collected from a student at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, an African American college, and first published in 1887. [4] The student said that he had learned it from an uncle who remembered it being used in camp meetings. It is found in this presentation under an alternative title, "Fare Ye Well," performed by the Metropolitan Community Church Choir.

After emancipation, many educated African Americans felt that spirituals should be left behind with slavery, while others sought to preserve them. In the 1870s, The Fisk Jubilee Singers, an a cappella African American men's and women's chorus founded at Fisk University, Tennessee, in 1871, by John Wesley Work, Jr., helped to introduce spirituals to a wider audience. Work was the first African American collector of African American folksongs.[5] The ensemble toured extensively throughout the country, beginning with a tour along the routes associated with the Underground Railroad. Their efforts to preserve and present spirituals was initially controversial among some African Americans, but the Fisk singers won critics over to the idea of preserving these songs. Their performances inspired the creation of similar singing groups and inspired existing groups at African American colleges to sing spirituals. In the first decades of the twentieth century, composers like Henry T. Burleigh (1866 – 1949) would go on to further popularize spirituals through their beloved arrangements of the tunes for choir and orchestra.

The Library of Congress's National Jukebox features digitized Victor recordings of a number of spirituals and hymns performed by the Fisk Jubilee Quartet, an all-male vocal quartet, also founded at Fisk by John Wesley Work, Jr. In this example of the quartet's performance of the old spiritual "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," John Wesley Work, Jr. sings the lead tenor part. For more on sprituals as an American musical style, see the article, "Spirituals."