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- Folk spirituals are spontaneously created and performed in a repetitive, improvised style. The most common song structures are the call-and-response (“Blow, Gabriel”) and repetitive choruses (“He Rose from the Dead”). The call-and-response is an alternating exchange between the soloist and the other singers.
timeline.carnegiehall.org › genres › folk-spiritualHistory of Folk Spiritual — Timeline of African American Music
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The folk spiritual is a form of improvised music, spontaneously created by individuals and groups. The concert spiritual, also known as arranged spirituals, evolved in schools created to educate the enslaved after emancipation.
A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s.
Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs.
Spirituals combine elements of European American religious music with African musical characteristics. Their influence can be felt in virtually all subsequent forms of American music, including jazz, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, country, rock and roll, and hip-hop.
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A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s. The African American spiritual (also called the Negro Spiritual) constitut...
Famous spirituals include \\"Swing low, sweet chariot,\\" composed by a Wallis Willis, and \\"Deep down in my heart.\\" The term \\"spiritual\\" is derived from the King James Bible translation of Ephesians 5:19: \\"Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.\\" The form has its roots...
Spirituals are 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. The vocal style abounded in freeform slides, turns and rhythms that were challenging for early publishers of spirituals to document accurately. Many spirituals, known as \\"sorrow songs,\\" a...
Spirituals are also sometimes regarded as codified protest songs, with songs such as \\"Steal away to Jesus,\\" composed by Wallis Willis, being seen by some commentators as incitements to escape slavery. Because the Underground Railroad of the mid- nineteenth century used terminology from railroads as a secret language for assisting slaves to freedo...
As Frederick Douglass, a nineteenth century abolitionist author and former slave, wrote in his book My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) of singing spirituals during his years in bondage: \\"A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,' something more than a hope of reaching h...
The publication of collections of spirituals in the 1860s started to arouse a broader interested in spirituals. In the 1870s, the creation of the Jubilee Singers, a chorus consisting of former slaves from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, sparked an international interest in the musical form. The group's extensive touring schedule in the Uni...
Many recordings of these rural spirituals, made between 1933 and 1942, are housed in the American Folklife Center collections at the Library of Congress. The collection includes such gems as \\"Run old Jeremiah,\\" a ring shout from Jennings, Alabama recorded by J. W. Brown and A. Coleman in 1934, which has a train-like accompaniment of stamping feet...
Black spirituals vary from white spirituals in a variety of ways. Differences include the use of microtonally flatted notes, syncopation and counter-rhythms marked by handclapping in black spiritual performances. Black spiritual singing also stands out for the singers' striking vocal timbre that features shouting, exclamations of the word \\"Glory!\\...
spiritual, in North American white and black folk music, an English-language folk hymn. White spirituals include both revival and camp-meeting songs and a smaller number of other hymns. They derived variously, notably from the “lining out” of psalms, dating from at least the mid-17th century.
Nov 21, 2023 · Spirituals are religious American folk songs created by and strongly associated with the African-American community, and are a sound combination of traditional Christian hymns and African musical...
