Joe, and everybody, the Cyber Hymnal (which recently changed its URL twice; hopefully they've settled down permanently now at tch.wordnic.com — I don't know what went wrong at Simplenet) actually has quite a few of the old standard Negro Spirituals, though usually with MIDIs better suited to white-style churches (heavy pianoforte where you want mainly voice). I notice they just added Steal Away in the last week or two.

But I resurrected this thread mainly to ask about a few Spirituals in connection with my hymnal. I just added nine more songs to my collection today, which brings it to a total of 200 (if I'm not forgetting any) hymns (including carols, spiritual songs, metrical psalms, etc. under the rubric "hymns"). Five of the nine are set to American Spiritual tunes (though only two are versions of the usual American texts), plus one is a setting of the Lord's Prayer to a calypso tune whose secular text(s) I'm interested in descrying. (I'd like to know what isle or archipelago it hails from, too.)

• Donu la manon is a translation of the Swedish "Räck mig din hand", set to a tune that sounds to me like Do Lord more than anything; I can't find "Do Lord" in the Digitrad, to see what you call the tune, nor is it in The Cyber Hymnal. Anybody know what the secular antecedent of the tune was?
• La lumo venis al la mond' is a translation of the Swedish "Det ljus som liv åt världen gav" set to "Michael row the boat ashore"
• Kune manghu ni nun is a translation of "Let us break bread together" to its proper tune
• Tero kaj chielo kantu is a translation of the German text "Erd und Himmel sollen singen" set to an African-American Spiritual tune the source calls "Singin' wid a sword in ma' han'". Anybody know the full text of the original Spiritual?
• Venkos ni en gloro, finally, is a Christian modification of the standard Esperanto version of "We Shall Overcome"

The other new songs in my hymnal are a version of Quelle est cette odeur? (What or Whence is this fragrance?), just in time to be too late for Christmas ;-(, and two original-in-Esperanto hymns to Maccabæus ( and this).

Liland