Sandra Jean Graham
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041631
- eISBN:
- 9780252050305
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041631.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Spirituals are religious folk songs created by African Americans in the early nineteenth century. This chapter defines folk spirituals as orally transmitted songs with variable texts and melodies, a ...
More
Spirituals are religious folk songs created by African Americans in the early nineteenth century. This chapter defines folk spirituals as orally transmitted songs with variable texts and melodies, a typically responsorial structure (call and response), textual and melodic repetition, typically gapped scales, and an ambiguous approach to pitch in performance. The texts tend to focus on crossing over into the heavenly afterlife, and performances encourage communal participation. As folk music, the performance of each spiritual is unique and improvisatory. This chapter describes traits of folk spirituals and methods of composition, surveys secondary literature on its origins in the black church and the camp meeting, and recounts the earliest efforts to transcribe spirituals.Less
Spirituals are religious folk songs created by African Americans in the early nineteenth century. This chapter defines folk spirituals as orally transmitted songs with variable texts and melodies, a typically responsorial structure (call and response), textual and melodic repetition, typically gapped scales, and an ambiguous approach to pitch in performance. The texts tend to focus on crossing over into the heavenly afterlife, and performances encourage communal participation. As folk music, the performance of each spiritual is unique and improvisatory. This chapter describes traits of folk spirituals and methods of composition, surveys secondary literature on its origins in the black church and the camp meeting, and recounts the earliest efforts to transcribe spirituals.
Sandra Jean Graham
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041631
- eISBN:
- 9780252050305
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041631.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry is the first book to trace the musical evolution of postwar spirituals. The jubilee singers who introduced them ignited a chain reaction ...
More
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry is the first book to trace the musical evolution of postwar spirituals. The jubilee singers who introduced them ignited a chain reaction that rippled throughout multiple levels of popular culture for the rest of the century, influencing blackface minstrelsy, stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other plays, and variety shows. The widespread influence of spirituals on popular amusements illustrates the symbolic distance these songs had traveled since the Civil War, when they had functioned as private, sacred folk music. The groups and individuals – both white and black – that appropriated spirituals in popular entertainments had wide-ranging and often conflicting agendas, from the preservationist to the educational to the commercially exploitative. This book examines how those agendas affected the musical style of spirituals and shaped black entertainment philosophies and and business practices.Less
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry is the first book to trace the musical evolution of postwar spirituals. The jubilee singers who introduced them ignited a chain reaction that rippled throughout multiple levels of popular culture for the rest of the century, influencing blackface minstrelsy, stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other plays, and variety shows. The widespread influence of spirituals on popular amusements illustrates the symbolic distance these songs had traveled since the Civil War, when they had functioned as private, sacred folk music. The groups and individuals – both white and black – that appropriated spirituals in popular entertainments had wide-ranging and often conflicting agendas, from the preservationist to the educational to the commercially exploitative. This book examines how those agendas affected the musical style of spirituals and shaped black entertainment philosophies and and business practices.
