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Slave Songs of the United States was a collection of African American music consisting of 136 songs. Published in 1867, it was the first, and most influential, [1] [2] collection of spirituals to be published. The collectors of the songs were Northern abolitionists William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware. [3]
The basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave's lament over his white master's death in a horse-riding accident. The song, however, is also interpreted as having a subtext of celebration about that death and of the slave having contributed to it through deliberate negligence or even deniable action. [3] [4] [5] [6]
Another song with a reportedly secret meaning is "Now Let Me Fly" [3] which references the biblical story of Ezekiel's Wheels. [4] The song talks mostly of a promised land. This song might have boosted the morale and spirit of the slaves, giving them hope that there was a place waiting that was better than where they were.
Black America has a long and winding history of using songs for defiance and consolation. Testimonies from slave ship sailors recall how kidnapped Africans during the Atlantic slave trade sang to ...
The song was sung by former slaves whose owners had abandoned the island before the Union navy arrived to enforce a blockade. Charles Pickard Ware was an abolitionist and Harvard graduate who had come to supervise the plantations on St. Helena Island from 1862 to 1865, and he wrote down the song in music notation as he heard the freedmen sing it.
The song was released on the extended play Negro Spirituals Vol. 1 (HMV 7EGN 27), and the song was arranged by Harry Douglas. American contralto Marian Anderson had her first successful recording with a version of the song on the Victor label in 1925. [7] Singer Lena Horne recorded a version of the song in 1946. [8]
The song presented the point of view, common to minstrelsy at the time, that slavery in the United States was a positive institution overall. The character of the pining slave had been used in minstrel tunes since the early 1850s, including Emmett's "I Ain't Got Time to Tarry" and "Johnny Roach".
This generated two distinctive African American slave musical forms, the spiritual (sung music usually telling a story) and the field holler (sung or chanted music usually involving repetition of the leader's line). [1] We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a spiritual. [1] As a folk song originating in a repressed culture, the song's origins are lost.