As posted elsewhere:

The more you listen to the spirituals that are documented as authentic spirituals, the more you hear songs that you realize later became blues or some variant of "gospel" you might have heard on a commercial recording. When these adaptations got recorded, whoever recorded it often grabbed a songwriting or arranging copyright, and thus established a toehold in the commercial music economy by making fair use of songs they had heard from their cradles. We confuse ourselves when we assume that they sat down one day and actually composed the song. As you hear the spirituals, you realize these commercial songs mostly floated up out of people's bellies, memories, and souls.

Stylistic features attributed to particular performers (especially the guitar work that fascinates us today) are actually representations of what they'd heard sung-- vocalizations improvised originally and then folk-processed into traditional parts of songs.

As an example, I always thought Gary Davis wrote some really cool gospel. Well, he didn't. He applied what he had heard, in so many cases I have found, that I suspect that's true of ALL his gospel work. "Wrote" is a pretty loose term, it turns out.

So "origins" questions can be, "what did this first mean" or "what is the earliest recording" or "when was it written down" or "who has copyright and why" or "who collected it in the field and when" or "who made the first dollar on this"......... And in our own time, "who recorded it" usually means vinyl. But to me it means WAX-- field recordings. Cuz it's FOLK music, whether it later got commercial enough to catch others' attention, or not.

At a certain point you stop documenting these relationships between spirituals and later, commercial songs, because there are too many, and there are so many versions, that it all finally just comes across as music to be enjoyed and taken into oneself.

~S