This thread is part of the African-American Spirituals Permathread project at Mudcat. It's not a permathread itself, but I may lift and edit some posts from this thread into that permathread.

I am NOT asking for specific bibliographic information-- book lists-- or specific sources. We already have those. I'm looking for the general categories from which one has gleaned some small part of the thousands of songs that slaves in the US slavery era indicate were created, on the spot, as a routine part of daily life in work, play, and religious life.

1. One place I got the spirituals I sing has been from the shared memories of African Americans whose recent ancestors (grandmothers, great-aunts) passed along songs they remembered from their earlier lives. These songs have sometimes been passed along the chain of memory entirely in sound-- have never had their texts or musical notation written down until they landed here at Mudcat as a transcription effort from a recording.

2. Another place I have gotten quite a few has been from recordings by African American operatic singers who have learned the songs from sheet music created by African American composers/arrangers.... usually, as I understand the provenance record, songs these composers or arrangers have recalled from sources such as I describe in 1, above. When talking to one such artist a couple of years ago, I was surprised and discomfited to realize that in a way, I knew more about the spirituals heritage than did the very talented, expressive African American man to whom I was speaking. The folk process had ended before he got to it-- his whole basis for the material was note-perfect learning from sheet music, with piano accompaniment. The generations intervening between his childhood, and slavery times, had stopped passing on the old music. (I have now had this interesting and awkward experience several times with other people.)

3. Sheet music created as transcriptions of songs collected in the field during and/or shortly after the slavery period, when a few white folks realized there was music of artistic and/or financial value in what they'd had an opportunity to hear (such as the Allen Slave Songs body of material). These are anologous to 4, below.

4. Field recordings of remembered material (see 1 above), a generation or more after slavery times, such as the Lomax material at the Library of Congress which consists of recordings and written notes from their visits with individuals in the southern states.

5. Hymnal sheet music based on any of the above.

6. When tunes, whole songs, lyrics, or fragments find their way back into the folk process by dint of folkies :~) and you pick up one you can further folk-process yourself, with or without a known connection to their possible origin as spirituals.

7. When tunes, whole songs, lyrics, or fragments are found to be alive and well in children's rhymes, games, playsongs, or jump-rope chants, though their possible origin as spirituals may no longer be connected to the transmission.

8. Texts, tunes, modes, or structures in blues (country blues and/or urban/electric blues).

9. Gospel music of any time or sub-genre where a text or tune can be traced back to relationship with spirituals.

10. Oldtime, early-country, or cowboy songs where the modality may have shifted to the major scale, but the text, tune pattern, etc. can be traced back to relationship with spirituals..... where the folk process has been parallel to the folk process of an authentic spirituals-sounding approach but is no longer bound my the melodic or form conventions of that genre (but you can always put it back to the minor mode and verse pattern).

11. Minstrel songs poking "fun" at black folk (by white or African American composers and/or performers) that may have been based on a specific spiritual.

12. How could I forget recordings of early barbershop quartets that standardized harmonies formerly improvised in spirituals sung during slave times.

13. Dance music.... (need more information)

14. Preaching, particularly pentecostal-style preaching, where what had been a sung spiritual is now used in a singsong/testifying tone to deliver a whole lyric or fragment within or at the beginning or end of a sermon. I have heard this in southern Black church recordings as well as White.

15. Parodies where the original text is gone or adapted but the modality and structure remain, from which a spiritual can be deduced/rewritten.

16. Folkmusic books and recordings where songs that originated as spirituals are later attributed as "traditional."

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What these modes of transmission have in common is that a folk process has been underway in some form or another, and that at some point a "definitive" version of some specific songs came to be widely accepted as "the right way" to do them. From that point on, the folk process has stopped or slowed so that some songs have become frozen into today's culture without encouraging the genre's original creativity to continue forward in time.

Your comments?

~Susan