Spiritual (religious song)

Spiritual (religious song), genre of religious folk song found in American black and white musical traditions. White spirituals, or revival spirituals, developed in the mass camp meetings that swept the country in the religious revival movement of the early 1800s. The roots of these songs include folk hymns, religious ballads, secular folk songs, and evangelical hymns by the English hymnodist Isaac Watts and others. Another precedent was the colonial church practice of “lining out,” in which a leader chanted a psalm verse and the congregation then sang it. Spirituals were commonly improvised from a stock of familiar melodic fragments and from “floating” verses (often sung by a leader) and refrains and tag lines such as “glory, hallelujah” (sung by the audience). As far as is known, the high tenors took the melody, the women and basses singing above or below them, producing a stirring sonority. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by the American poet Julia Ward Howe, is written to the melody and format of an old revival spiritual.

The few early references to spiritual-like songs sung by black slaves date from about 1819. Black and white spirituals share many tunes and texts; blacks and whites mingled at the camp meetings, and musical influences probably traveled both ways. Both traditions use pentatonic tunes and extensive melodic ornamentation, and lining out resembles the pervasive call-and-response (solo-chorus alternation) pattern of African music. Black spirituals also show significant melodic and rhythmic relationships with West African songs. They are also linked with the ring shout, an ecstatic dance of African origin. Black spirituals were sung with an African vocal quality and to African polyrhythmic accompaniment of finger-snapping, clapping, and stamping. Until after the American Civil War they were apparently sung without harmony. Examples include “Deep River” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” Black spirituals were often used as work songs and sometimes contained coded information as a form of secret communication. In the late 1800s both black and white spirituals were largely displaced in churches by gospel songs, though they remained popular in concert halls.

See also African Music; African American Music; Gospel Music.