WELCOME, INTRODUCTION, PROJECT CREDITS, & LANGUAGE USAGE
28 January, 2007Welcome to the Mudcat's African-American Spirituals PermaThread™! I'm very proud of the work Mudcat does to bring this body of work together, and I am pleased that it has been a ready resource for those who perform and extend this music in our own time.
This thread brings together a body of posted material that was collected over a period of time, and then much later it was decided to index it by its genre... making the study of this folk corpus acessible, here, as it is not accessible anywhere else in the world.
These posts represent the work of a dedicated international team of contributors including about a dozen Mudcatters of a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints about the spirituals. The team members are credited and thanked not only in this thread but also in the threads where they researched, transcribed, and posted many of the indexed songs.
Because it was my task to organize the work they did, creating a standardized format, it was also my task to post it. But I hope no one ever forgets that this is the work of our Mudcat community, not strictly my work.
~Susan Hinton
motormice@hotmail.com
PROJECT CREDITS
Dicho mined and posted spirituals from online sources. What a gift, to be able to hear them and to easily find the lyrics, epsecially the hundreds that Dicho combed out of the Lomax field notes and recordings!
Masato added information about variants and recordings as he spotted them.
Earl went through a batch of old Mudcat threads using some Supersearches I worked up for him, looking for more Posted Spirituals.
Members Q and Azizi are frequent contributors to threads about spirituals, as well as this thread. Azizi has posted links to online videos of a number of spirituals in performance, in threads you will find in the index.
LANGUAGE USAGE
This project includes historical materials that may contain
presently-offensive language or negative stereotypes
reflecting the culture or language of
a particular period or place.
These items are presented as part of
the historical record.