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Black American Spiritual Songs

The purpose of this research is to examine the development and function of black American spiritual songs between 1700 and 1865. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which culturally distinctive African-American music informed American culture as a whole and then to discuss how spirituals were operationalized both as articulations of religious experience and--more important--as mechanisms of social cohesion, survival, and subversion, the last-named element finding its most potent and utilitarian expression in the idea of escape from slavery.

No discourse of Negro spirituals can reach meaning without reference to American slavery, which became progressively more embedded in the consciousness of the people who were progressively less thinking of themselves as English or European than as Americans. Indeed, the readiness of the English colonists in the New World to accept the fact of Negro slavery and to consider it as the sanctioned enslavement of alien peoples who could not properly be called colonists has been well documented. In his account of the migrations from England to America on the part of people who were seeking to practice their religion in a condition of absolute freedom from state interference, Becker explains with some irony (165ff) that the freedom-loving Puritans and religious dissenters were little troubled by depriving others of their freedom; it was part of an evolving uniquely "American" attitude toward personal independence. That slaves would be programmatically deprived of personal independence did not penetrate their consciousness.

Undoubtedly, slavery appears to have operated as a by-product of physical conditions and economic structures of the New World that had been grafted--at least in the initial phase of mass colonization--from the social hierarchies of the Old World. There was a culture of servitude in place in the earliest years of migration. Before 1619, when record...

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Black American Spiritual Songs. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:40, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689235.html