Spirituals
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals incorporate the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft. These songs were used to share coded messages, unite people, express feelings and emotions, and to keep their culture alive throughout the generations. They eventually were performed in churches, schools, and concerts. This form of African-American heritage influenced music around the world.
Beyond their musical significance, spirituals played a crucial role in encouraging and uplifting African Americans throughout history. These songs provided hope, comfort, and resilience during the darkest periods of slavery and segregation. Singing together allowed enslaved individuals to build solidarity, maintain a sense of community, and draw strength from shared struggles. Spirituals often incorporated biblical themes of deliverance and liberation, resonating with listeners who longed for freedom and justice. By turning to stories such as the Exodus, African Americans found inspiration and a spiritual framework to endure hardship and keep faith in the possibility of a better future.
The tradition of spirituals began in the early 1700s among enslaved Africans in the American South, particularly on plantations where communal singing was both a survival strategy and a subtle form of resistance. This genre emerged from the blending of African musical traditions with Christian hymns introduced by missionaries and slaveholders. Spirituals first flourished in secret worship meetings, also known as where enslaved people gathered away from the eyes of overseers. Over time, spirituals spread to camp meetings and revivals, becoming central to African American religious and cultural expression. Through these songs, generations found the encouragement and unity needed to persevere and eventually challenge the institution of slavery.
Not only did African Americans have to mask their singing, they also had to worship in secret. The “invisible church” refers to the secret religious gatherings formed by enslaved African Americans when they were denied the freedom to worship openly or express their own spiritual practices. These hidden meetings took place in remote areas such as woods, cabins, or secluded clearings and allowed enslaved people to combine Christian teachings with African traditions in ways that were not permitted under the watchful eyes of enslavers. Within these gatherings, participants could pray, sing, and testify without fear of punishment, creating a spiritual community rooted in shared struggle and hope. The musical practices that developed in the invisible church—especially call-and-response singing, ring shouts, and improvised spirituals—became essential foundations of African American sacred music. These songs carried layered meanings, offering both religious comfort and coded messages of resistance or escape. The invisible church ultimately provided emotional strength, cultural preservation, and a sense of collective identity, shaping African American musical and religious life for generations.
Prior to the end of the US Civil War and emancipation, spirituals were originally an oral tradition passed from one slave generation to the next. Biblical stories were memorized then translated into song. Following emancipation, the lyrics of spirituals were published in printed form. Ensembles such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers—established in 1871—popularized spirituals, bringing them to a wider, even international, audience.
At first, major recording studios were only recording white musicians performing spirituals and their derivatives. That changed with Mamie Smith's commercial success in 1920. Starting in the 1920s, the commercial recording industry increased the audience for the spirituals and their derivatives.
Black composers Harry Burleigh and R. Nathaniel Dett created a "new repertoire for the concert stage" by applying their Western classical education to the spirituals. While the spirituals were created by a "circumscribed community of people in bondage", over time they became known as the first "signature" music of the United States.
Terminology
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians—one of the largest reference works on music and musicians—itemized and described "spiritual" in their electronic resource, Grove Music Online—an important part of Oxford Music Online, as a "type of sacred song created by and for African Americans that originated in oral tradition. Although its exact provenance is unknown, spirituals were identifiable as a genre by the early 19th century." They used the term without the descriptor, "African American".The term "Negro spirituals" is a 19th-century word "used for songs with religious texts created by African Enslaved in America". The first published book of slave songs referred to them as "spirituals".
In musicology and ethnomusicology in the 1990s, the single term "spirituals" is used to describe "The Spirituals Project".
The US Library of Congress uses the phrase "African American Spirituals", for the numbered and itemized entry. In the introductory phrase, the singular form is used without the adjective "African American." Throughout the encyclopedic entry the singular and plural form of the term, is used without the "African American" descriptor. The LOC introductory sentence says, "A spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of African people in the American South. The songs proliferated in the last few decades of the eighteenth century leading up to the abolishment of legalized slavery in the 1860s. The African American spiritual constitutes one of the largest and most significant forms of American folksong."
Context
The transatlantic slave trade is described by a United Nations report as the largest forced migration in recorded human history. As a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade, the greatest movement of Africans was to the Americas—with 96 percent of the captives from the African coasts arriving on cramped slave ships at ports in South America and the Caribbean Islands. From 1501 to 1830, four Africans crossed the Atlantic for every one European, making the demographics of the Americas in that era more of an extension of the African diaspora than a European one. The legacy of this migration is still evident today, with large populations of people of African descent living throughout the Americas. Millions more remained enslaved in Africa, where slavery was a complex and deeply-rooted part of culture going back centuries before widespread European presence on the continent.From 1501 through 1867, approximately "12.5 million Africans" from "almost every country with an Atlantic coastline" were kidnapped and coerced into slavery, according to the 2015 Atlas based on about 35,000 slaving voyages. Roughly 6% of all enslaved Africans transported via the trans-Atlantic slave trade arrived in the United States, both before and after the colonial era; the remainder went to Brazil, the West Indies or other regions. The majority of these Africans came from the West African slave coast. Other sources estimate the Islamic slave trade also kidnapped similar numbers of Africans, with between 8 million and 17 million individuals taken from Africa between the 8th and 19th centuries along the Trans-Saharan trade routes.
The Portuguese Empire transported the first African enslaved peoples to the New World in the 1560s, and until the 1700s Mexico was the primary destination for those captives under Spanish control. The first African enslaved people in what is now the United States arrived in 1526, making landfall in present-day Winyah Bay, South Carolina in a short-lived colony called San Miguel de Gualdape under control of the Spanish Empire. They were also the first enslaved Africans in North Americas to stage a slave rebellion. In 1619, the first slave ship had carried twenty people from the west central African kingdom of Kongo—to a life of enslavement in what is now Mexico. The Kingdom of Kongo, at that time stretched over an area of in the watershed of the Congo River—the second longest river in Africa—and had a population of 2.5 million—was one of the largest African kingdoms. For a brief period, King João I of Kongo, who reigned from 1470 to 1509, had voluntarily converted to Catholicism, and for close to three centuries—from 1491 to 1750—the kingdom of Kongo had practiced Christianity and was an "independent cosmopolitan realm." The descendants of the rice-plantation enslaved Gullah people—whose country of origin is Sierra Leone—were unique because they had been much more isolated on the islands off the coast of South Carolina. Gullah spirituals are sung in a Creole language that was influenced by African American Vernacular English with the majority of African words coming from the Akan, Yoruba and Igbo. The institution of slavery in the United States ended with the conclusion of the US Civil War in 1865.
The domestic slave trade that emerged after the United States Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808 and lasted until the U.S. Civil War destroyed generations of African American families. Slavery in the United States differed from the institution in other regions of the Americas, such as the West Indies, Dutch Guiana and Brazil. In the U.S., the enslaved had higher rates of survival and thus there was a "high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half—with numbers nearly tripling by the end of the domestic slave trade in the 1860s." During that period, "approximately 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America," were displaced—spouses were separated from one another, and parents were separated from their children. By 1850, most enslaved African Americans were "third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans." In the 1800s, the majority of enslaved people in the British West Indies and Brazil had been born in Africa, whereas in the United States, they were "generations removed from Africa."