Getting happy (Christianity)
Getting happy, an experience seen almost exclusively in the Black Church and in Pentecostal churches generally, refers to the experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit, usually involving ecstatic singing, dancing, and a general spiritual fervor. It is heavily associated with shout music.
Accounts of nineteenth-century African American slave spirituality use the term, as recorded in the book God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves.
One of the early nineteenth-century traditional 'Negro Spirituals' to use the phrase, is the following: