Paul Robeson's performances definitely count as "professionally arranged". However, in Gospel music, as in many genres of American music, there is no marked distinction between folklore, entertainment, and learned music. This is generally different with European traditional music; here, performers must make a conscious decision whether they want to evoke (if not reproduce) the context in which the music was created, or not.

Still, we must be aware that many songs we now regard as folk songs have in fact been composed by persons who were well able to accompany them on keyboard instruments. Quite a number of them were originally published with an easy piano accompaniment, designed for domestic use in bourgeois households.