Many of them are grouped with the spirituals in the African Amercican Spirituals Permathread. Definitions of spirituals are fluid (by time, culture, and political correctness). Since many of what we think of now as "work songs" were used to facilitate the work done under slavery, and were passed among the slaves-- they all kind of blend together despite effoirts to separate them into hard-and-fast categories, if you study any individual song long enough and get get far enough back in time.

But it's an uneven path, working back like that.... For instance, before I learned so much about spirituals I might have said that this song I knew as a child is strictly a "white" composition or European-American construction, just due to the major-scale tune this musician knows for it. But a lot of the music now called "spirituals" in hymnals and classrooms is actually music "sanitized" out of the minor scale and put into a rigid text, with a major-scale tune, that turn out to have started as very different-sounding songs with variable and improvised texts.

That's why the Spirituals Permathread doesn't try to impose those rigid divisions, but simply refers students to threads just like this one where ideas and facts can be added to the lore of any individual song.

~Susan