Thanks Azizi!

More on African dervived qualities that can be found in Black Gospel/Negro spirtuals

Africans in the New World certainly brought their own traditions with them, although they were often prevented from overtly practicing those traditions. But far from being lost, these traditions surfaced nevertheless, often blended with elements acceptable to whites, such as religious ceremonies or seemingly patriotic fife and drum ensembles. Most of those enslaved came originally from West Africa, and there were a number of different tribes in this region. (8) However, the music of these different tribes does share some common components. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. describes these components

          as the characterizing and foundational elements of African-American music: calls, cries and hollers; call-and-response devices; additive rhythms and polyrhythms; heterophony, pendular thirds, blue notes, bent notes and elisions; hums, moans, grunts, vocables and other rhythmic-oral declamations, interjections and punctuations; off-beat melodic phrasings and parallel intervals and chords; constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases (from which riffs and vamps would be derived); timbral distortions of various kinds; musical individuality within collectivity; game rivalry; hand-clapping, foot-patting and approximations thereof; apart playing; and the metronomic pulse that underlies all African-American music


"Slave Songs of the United States" By William Francis Allen, 1830-1889

description of the vocal technique(s)the slaves used when singing these spirituals...

       As stated in Slaves Songs In The United States,

"The best that we can do, however, with paper and types, or even with voices, will convey but a faint shadow of the original. The voices of the colored people have a peculiar quality that nothing can imitate; and the intonation and delicate variations of even one singer cannot be reproduced on paper. And I despair of conveying any notion of the effect of a number singing together."

"And what makes it all the harder to unravel a thread of melody out of this strange network is that, like birds, they seem not infrequently to strike sounds that cannot be precisely represented by the gamut, and abound in "slides" from one note to another, and turns and cadences not in articulated notes." "It is difficult to express the entire character of these Negro ballads by mere musical notes and signs. The odd turns made in the throat, and the curious rhythmic effect produced by single voices chiming in at different irregular intervals, seem almost as impossible to place on the score as the singing of birds or the tones of an Aeolian Harp."