A discussion about the song JOHN THE REVELATOR includes this excerpted post:

Subject: RE: ADD: John the Revelator ^^
From: WYSIWYG - PM
Date: 17 Sep 07 - 09:08 AM

This is an example of how a spiritual can pop out of the past. I can't know for sure if this IS one of those, but it illustrates the difficulty of "tracing" an "attributed" song. It also evinces the musician's approach of just DOING it and not worrying about the origin because (A) the song stands on its own and (B) because the singer's relationship with the origin is an internal experience (and (C) sometimes a mystical one).

When I songlead/teach a spiritual or a song styled as a spiritual, I start out (just like Son does in this video), singing both the call and the response parts and using body language to point up which is which. Where Son leaves off in this video (because it is, after all, a performance), I go on (because I am, after all, songleading) to get the people involved in the responses.

For a performer it's the whole, many-layered experience of the performance that matters. For me, when I songlead, it's about the whole experience of the interactivity. "Interactivity" (what a sterile term for a richly organic complexity) was one of the main thrusts of the spirituals, among the people who originated them.... In that interactivity I feel (organically) the privilege of being able to share at least that much with the originators.


Further support for this view (of likely spirituals-originating material popping into mainstream culture later) can be found in the work of the late JOE CARTER, especially in an interview that includes songs, persectives, and how he remembers learning spirituals through family memories (referenced in the African American Spirituals Permathread).

Additionally, an early variant noted upthread is from the same general time period as the The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip (a Library of Congress collection also referenced in the African American Spirituals Permathread): The fieldnotes, prepared by John and Ruby Lomax during and shortly after their 1939 recording trip in the South, contain their itinerary, notes on the geography and culture of the regions visited, biographical and anecdotal information on some performers, historical and descriptive information on some recordings,excerpts from correspondence, lists of song titles, typed portions of song text, and handwritten song text. During that time period-- within the life span of former slaves-- a lot of songs were shifting out of memory and into the growing Black Gospel and Blues traditions. There are MANY songs first accepted in widestream culture as "blues" that have turned out, with later attributive detail added, to have been based on/extended textually from spirituals.

The Fort collection of that time period is further contemporaneous illustration.

My point is not that these can be "proved" as spirituals, but that an early recording or text date syaing otherwise does not DISPORIVE them as spiritualks, and that we, at this point in time, cannot know for sure because the genre defies rigid definition. To attempt to "definitively" say that any given song is not a spiritual or based heavily upon one textually and melodically is, IMO, revisionist and anachronistic and to rely on fragmentary "evidence" as though it is the whole story.

But we know, from thread after thread, in every kind of folk subgenre I can think of, that even when someone has written in their diary, "I wrote such and such today," there is often an earlier influence, source, or fragment involved that comes to light later. This can happen innocently or not innocently... there are examples of artists who have put a song into the record in some way, and claimed royalty rights by attaching their name-- this was not the same terrible plagiarism we might think of today, but fairly relaxed practice in the dawn of the popular recording industry.

Again, my point is just that we can never be sure we have the whole story on a folk song-- that's part of what MAKES it a folk song! And that therefore, we can never be sure we have them all.

~Susan