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Lauri ScheyerHunan Normal University

The spirituals created by enslaved African Americans may be the most enduring and influential canon of sung poems produced on North American soil. Their origins can only be hypothesized, but they likely date back to the beginning of the international slave trade, based on reports of kidnapped Africans singing in coffles as they were marched to slave ships. Evidence suggests that these sung poems were performed on American soil for two centuries before being transcribed and collected in the nineteenth century by clergy and abolitionists including Richard Allen, William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, Rev. Marshall W. Taylor, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Although the spirituals are products of American plantation culture and evangelical Christianity, they display ample evidence of African survivals based on the work and communal songs described by European seafarers, explorers, and traders dating back to the fifteenth century.¹ These “Slave Songs of the United States,” as they were called in the seminal collection by Allen et al. (1867), were described by perplexed but fascinated early auditors in contradictory terms: “unforgettable,” “weird,” “wild,” “cheerful,” “sad,” “primitive,” “uncanny,” “barbaric,” “unearthly,” “senseless,” “pathetic,” “monotonous,” and “childlike”.² They are also referred to as slave songs, plantation hymns, anthems, religious folk music, spiritual songs, cabin songs, oral culture, vernacular music, work songs, Negro ballads, folk spirituals and seculars, and jubilees. Their literary value as lyric poetry in English has generally been overlooked while their “difference” as aesthetic and cultural products, as well as their influence on African American religion and music, has been stressed. Although there is a long history in the Western tradition of extolling originality, the spirituals have been more commonly treated with bafflement and even hostility for their perceived strangeness, and their resistance to placement in conventional categories. These uncanny lyrics and haunting melodies were experienced by mystified admirers and hostile detractors alike as something unique unto themselves—recognizable as aesthetic cultural products, yet difficult to place into existing literary, liturgical, sociopolitical, or musical categories.³

The mysterious and compelling lyrics created by enslaved African Americans are an abiding and unique contribution to the national and global songbook, and central to the body of national and world literature that uses poems as instruments of protest and political action. These poems of diasporic origins likely dating to the seventeenth century are omnipresent in American society, and in many world cultures, especially in the postbellum, modern, and postmodern periods. Yet their provenance has been largely overlooked, and they have been afforded scant sophisticated analysis as lyric poetry. The tremendous originality of the slave songs and their operations as instruments of avant-garde practices have been especially ignored. They have played a dynamic yet often underappreciated role, particularly for their extraordinary inventiveness, in imaginatively inspiring some of the most formally and conceptually innovative poetic products in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

In the nineteenth century, commentators struggled to compare the spirituals—often with the motive of proving that they were derivative and substandard copies—to other bodies of music and literature, including “Scotch and Scandinavian ballads” by Higginson. Musicologists such as George Pullen Jackson, Richard Wallascheck, Newman I. White, Guy B. Johnson, and Edmund S. Lorenz claimed they were influenced by white European Protestant and Methodist hymns as well as Scottish barroom ballads and German school songs. Although theories of white origins persisted, the spirituals were clearly distinctive creations with distinguishing literary, musical, performative, thematic, and structural characteristics. As oral poems, they contain many of the mnemonic devices that allow lyrics to be quickly learned and shared, such as the movable blocks of allusions, references, metaphors, words, phrases, content, and imagery described by William Barton as “mosaics” and by Eileen Southern as “wandering choruses.”⁴ The common practice of lining out, in which a leader sings a line of a hymn that the congregation repeats, would also enable the spirituals to be shared and preserved. These set-pieces allowed for substantial variation and improvisation, providing opportunities for spontaneity juxtaposed with patterned structures, which differentiated these continuously varying oral poems from the unchanging rigidity of canonical textuality and concepts of “correct” or “finished” versions. Their changing performance as oral texts valuing improvisation and creativity surrounding familiar forms and phrases explains why collections contain differing “versions” of the spirituals. The transcriptions made by early auditors were later given formal musical arrangements. The oral “originals”—which themselves were the remembered versions of individual performers—could only be captured long after Emancipation when technology enabled methods of recording performances by formerly enslaved African Americans.

The spirituals’ senses of dynamic immediacy and participant engagement were heightened by syncopation. They were performed with exuberant physicality, including unison dancing, clapping, bodily swaying, spontaneous shouts of jubilation and strong emotional affect, and rhythmic motions. Rather than solely individual acts of poetic exclamation, they were intended as acts of a group, expressed through such devices as antiphony, the call-and-response patterns between changing leaders and participants. Transporting the community’s emotions and information, the spirituals were performed by the ensemble in all social contexts during times of relaxation, worship, and labor. Their diction was conversational and vernacular heavily interlaced with elaborate irony, allusions, allegory, sarcasm, repetition, hyperbole, surrealism, natural and biblical themes and imagery, and multiple meanings.

During Reconstruction and into the Nadir, both black and white audiences treated the spirituals with ambivalence. For many African Americans, they were painful reminders of the shameful period of slavery best left in the past in order to move forward; for others, they represented an indelible moment in black history that ended in victory and should be preserved. For some white Americans, they were nostalgic vestiges of sentimentalized plantation culture and misled visions of “happily singing” enslaved people; for others, out of virulent racism, the spirituals were products either to mock in minstrel shows or ignore as expressions of African American subjectivity. Their earliest transcriptions were primarily by white auditors, often with self-acknowledged guesswork and the challenges of a limited ability to accurately preserve all of the salient musical and performative qualities, including the multiple and constantly changing versions, variable pitches, sighs, moans, throat turns, hums, blue notes, interjected responses, foot-tapping, dance movements, and pattin’ juba, a mode of percussion created by stomping and slapping the body. The postbellum and early twentieth-century interventions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Fisk University and the Hampton Institute transformed the spirituals into the formal versions known as the concert tradition which reflected European choral practices, and for some audiences, provided evidence of African Americans’ encultured “progress” and “refinement.” R. Nathaniel Dett, Harry T. Burleigh, J. Rosamond Johnson, and William Levi Dawson created some of the most popular concert arrangements. By doing so, however, some of the features that were originally so arresting and peculiar to the early auditors were minimized or erased, while other distinctive qualities of their harmonic, melodic, and literary beauty and power were preserved.

Numbering 6,000 or more, the spirituals are not only the largest body of sung poems in American history, but their past and current influence also may be unsurpassed. They are so deeply engrained in American culture that their provenance as diasporic poems created by kidnapped and enslaved Africans is often overlooked and comes as a surprise. These renowned works are central to the American “folk” songbook and to the body of literary and national allusions; they include “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Kumbaya,” “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” “Go Down Moses,” “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “Let Us Break Bread Together On Our Knees,” “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho,” “Do Lord, Do Lord, Do Remember Me,” “Gimme That Old Time Religion,” “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” “Many Thousand Gone” (“No More Auction Block For Me”), “Oh, Freedom!,” “Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart,” “Rise, Shine, Give God the Glory,” “Rock of Ages,” “There’s a Meetin’ Here Tonight,” “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “My Lord What a Mornin’,” “Go, Tell It on the Mountain,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” and “You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley.”

The lyrics of these sung poems have been loved, translated, and treasured internationally, with a continuing flow of new arrangements, recorded and sung in houses of worship of multiple religions and denominations, school recitals, community organizations, choral recitals and orchestral performances, in multiple musical genres from rock to jazz to blues to gospel, and at political and labor rallies, often by crowds that might be startled to discover the creation story of the words they are singing. Because their provenance may be unknown to some who perform and enjoy the spirituals in the twentieth and twenty-first century, they are widely perceived as universal messages of human struggle (“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”), encouragement to persevere (“You’ve Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley”), consolation and joy (“My Lord, What a Morning!”), celebration and jubilation (“Go Tell It on the Mountain!”), hope (“Keep Inching Along”), mourning and consolation (“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”), cheery uplift (“This Little Light of Mine”), exhortations to persevere in times of hardship (“Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Around”), Christian (“Lord, I Want to Be a Christian in My Heart”) and ecumenical religious faith (“Rise, Shine, Give God the Glory”), political peace (“Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”), making peace with humankind (“Kumbaya”), or demands for equal respect and treatment (“Oh Freedom!”), often interpreted as metaphorical commentary on the human condition without fully comprehending their specific and horrific instigating circumstances. As anonymous lyrics, their identity is often mistaken: these antebellum creations have been misattributed to early-twentieth-century labor movements and the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.

In addition to the uniqueness of their presentational features, a body of characteristic literary and conceptual themes can be noted in many spirituals. John Wesley Work divided them into songs of joy, sorrow, faith, hope, love, determination, adoration, patience, courage, and humility. R. Nathaniel Dett called them “hymns” with even more precise categorizations of theme: admonition, aspiration, Bible, Jesus Christ and Christianity (resurrection, religious experience, second coming, death of Christ, Christmas, deliverance), holidays and occasions, consolation, death, encouragement, faith and fellowship, future life, invitation, judgment, meditation, occasions, penitence, pilgrimage, praise, and tribulation. Roland Hayes divided spirituals into the large classifications of Old Testament, Old and New Testament, and Life of Christ.⁵

Several dominant literary operations are also identifiable in many of the spirituals. We often find uncanny imagery, including references to physical enslavement that entail the ability of the spirit or mind to transcend the body. Time was often presented in a suspended and fluid state, with ancestors and biblical figures blending into the present and the future hovering within close reach. Interchangeable segments of lyrics with similar lines, images, phrases, and even whole stanzas recur in multiple songs. Extensive uses of varied patterns of phonic, lexical, phrasal, and referential repetition are often correlated with the call-and-response form. Rhyme schemes are irregular in comparison with the conventions of the Anglo-American canon, more akin to sprung rhyme, and relying heavily on repetition, alliteration, and off-rhyme for echoic and sonic cohesion. The lines and verses are of variable lengths that appear to coordinate with the breath and rhythmic dance movements. Thematic discontinuities or metaphorical and intuitive poetic jumps take place freely within the same spiritual, creating fantastical metaphors and cognitive blends that derive from seemingly discontinuous themes and subjects in the same spiritual. Often such apparent thematic disintegration relates to brilliant uses of hidden messages intended for selective audiences, such as political messages of insurrection and resistance or advice on escape opportunities. The rhythmic patterns, like the rhyming patterns, are sprung, variable, and complex, and driven by orality, musicality, and physicality rather than textuality. We find extensive uses of the call-and-response structure where revolving leaders feed phrases or refrains to the group to repeat either verbatim or more often with inventive responsive variations.

The tone of the songs is often conveyed through satirical humor, sarcasm, allegory, allusion, indirect forms of quotation, veiled insults of playing the dozens and toasts, and signifying. Songs with a veneer of religiosity often veil coded underlying themes and dictions that are both secular and prayerful, such as the stress on themes of slavery and freedom, punitive justice to wrongdoers, payback and retribution, and the hypocrisy of slave-holders. Many examples contain extended development of specific biblical narratives—often those relating to slavery, imprisonment, freedom, heavenly reward, divine intervention, prophetic dreams, good over evil, justice over injustice, and examples of perseverance to overcome greater and malevolent powers. The biblical allusions, frames, and references are often conveyed through direct address of ancestors, biblical figures, heroic models, and spirit guides, which brings together African survivals with Christian belief. The vernacular diction is connected to unusual syntax and inventive lexical formations.

The Western philosophical framework of Cartesian dualism is absent, enabling the mind to be depicted as traveling freely from the body. Satan is often depicted in the form of a trickster figure, a conflation of African survivals and plantation culture that is perpetuated in subsequent African American literary and cultural tradition. The past and present are dominant modes of consciousness, with the future conceptualized as a direct and immediate extension of the present. Relationships are described as being in a potential state of mutual perpetual communication, even after the death of the body. Individual identity and value are explicitly connected with community identity, membership, and contribution.

Although they are indeed prominent and impactful as beloved messages of hope and perseverance on political, social, religious, musical, and national levels, there is a perplexing pattern of ignoring the spirituals as the great literature that they are. The spirituals are routinely excluded from textbooks of African American as well as American literature, and when they do appear, it is frequently as a short assortment relegated to such sub-categories as “folk,” “vernacular,” or “oral” traditions without contextualizing commentary or analysis of their literary qualities. Their influence on African American literature is indisputable across all time periods on such canonical writers as James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Melvin B. Tolson, Calvin C. Hernton, Margaret Walker, Waring Cuney, Sterling A. Brown, Robert Hayden, Sonia Sanchez, Lance Jeffers, Amiri Baraka, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Douglas Kearney, Russell Atkins, Kamau Brathwaite, Raymond Patterson, Fenton Johnson, and countless others. Sterling A. Brown ascribed their importance to their being self-defining instead of an externally imposed description of the African American experience. Alain Locke considered them to be both a racial product and to hold universal meaning for all Americans. John Lovell, Jr. contrasted their disregard with other revered national literatures:

…an epic tradition in the class of the Iliad, the Songs of Roland, or the Lays of the Nibelungs, with no clear analysis of the soil from which they sprung or the process of their growth. In other epic traditions, patient scholars have found seeds of racial and national culture. They look there first. And yet for how many years have the dabblers in American “Negroitis” ignored or treated with disgraceful cavalierness the heart of the Negro spirituals!

(Lovell 1969, p. 30)

Lovell’s outrage is a call to rectify this blind injustice. The spirituals deserve a place at the bedrock of the canon as one of the earliest, largest, and most influential bodies of American poetry.

The systemic failure to respect and regard slave songs as indispensable American lyric poetry goes to the heart of the biased development of the canon. It is a fact that some of our finest and earliest American poems—which even now remain invisible as part of the lyric poetry tradition—were produced by anonymous enslaved African Americans, an uncomfortable idea which may precisely explain their exclusion from the highest echelons of literary regard. As James Weldon Johnson wrote in the Preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals, “The white people among whom the slaves lived did not originate anything comparable even to the mere titles of the Spirituals.”⁶ The spirituals are a record of an oppressed people’s ability to surmount inconceivable inhumanity, and as such, are a reminder of the ongoing impact of that cruel and inescapable legacy. That is part of their message and identity, while their literary value as inspirational texts transcends their origins to serve as a universal testimonial to human fortitude. They contain the properties and effects of literariness that are found in commonly shared definitions, including Aristotle’s dictum in Poetics 22 that literary language should be both familiar and strange. Like the greatest works of literature, the spirituals foreground aesthetic uses of language as creative material or substance, formally organize ideas and emotions emphasizing lexical and stylistic patterns, employ ineffable effects and interpretations beyond the denotative level of meaning, feature techniques and devices that intentionally exploit the polysemous and multi-layered properties of language, emphasize sonic dimensions of language’s inherent musicality, and use auditory and/or visual operations and techniques for purposes of differentiation from functional utilitarian communication.

In an illuminating comparison of the poems of David Drake (Dave the Potter) and George Moses Horton, Faith Barrett develops a cogent and illuminating argument that both poets relied on experimental techniques of layering to simultaneously convey their competency in the formal standards of the “white elite” and establish their self-positions in a stature of critique (Barrett 2018). Although Barrett does not address the spirituals, this argument can be usefully extended to that body of contemporaneous literary expressions similarly freighted with the task of slipping past captors and overseers without causing alarm or suspicion and yet expressing self-efficacy, self-determinacy, and subjectivity. The comparison of Horton and Drake helps point out the frequently overlooked but key dimension of the spirituals that reinforces their difference from early figures such as Drake, Horton, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: the spirituals are transcriptions. We have received the songs as cultural artifacts through the mediation of auditors, interpreters, and transcribers who essentially functioned in the roles of translators and scribes. These are not the writings of the enslaved poets who created them: they are oral products that have been transformed into written language with “normalized” spelling and other editorial incursions. The widespread antebellum legal prohibition of African American literacy, and the culturally tolerated abhorrence of the idea of educated African Americans, including after Emancipation and well into the Jim Crow twentieth century, formed the foundation for African Americans to turn inventively to diverse mechanisms to preserve and share their words and ideas.

Like life in a war zone, enslavement must have been a combination of the soul-crushing boredom of repetitive tasks and the constant threat of violence and violation, including, at the slave-owners’ whim, sudden relocations to other plantations and often the separation of families. These conditions are represented in the spirituals, which reflect that experience thematically and structurally and were as portable and transportable as the enslaved peoples’ lives. Yet these products, expressing an unpredictable and transmutable communal experience forged from creatively interchangeable components, have been passed along misleadingly as static texts. We can experience the collections of spirituals as versions or interpretations but must remember that their earliest preservation by their creators was in oral form, not in print. We find “translations” and approximations of vernacular diction which reflect the fascination of the early transcribers who recognized that the spirituals were unique materials that were important to preserve while recognizing the difficulties of faithful representation. In these “versions” of the oral poems, we also encounter the limited auditory, technical, and experiential capabilities of the early transcribers to reproduce what they were hearing; that uncertainty is acknowledged directly in a number of sources, including Higginson and Allen, Ware, and Garrison.⁷ Our literary analysis and apparatus must incorporate direct acknowledgement that we are at a mediated remove from the spirituals’ authors, and have less ability to determine their intents and meanings than poets like Drake, Horton, and Wheatley who wrote their own words. The critical tradition has a long history of judging and defining the African American poetry canon based on print publications and supplanting the necessary primacy of oral products with textual versions.

The spirituals serve as an omnipresent source of allusions in African American and world literature. Because references to spirituals tend to be indirect, allusion becomes a salient trope in this case. Allusion, the intentional but indirect evocation of one work by another, is an ancient and basic literary property and defines the process that makes a classic. The lasting works of literature are those that other authors incorporate and comment on in their own new writing, which proves the continuing meaning of the earlier works and keeps them alive. Robert Alter provides this baseline explanation: “Allusion occurs when a writer, recognizing the general necessity of making literary work by building on the foundations of antecedent literature, deliberately exploits this predicament in explicitly activating an earlier text as part of the new system of meaning and aesthetic value of his own text” (Alter 1989, p. 111). The reader is meant to recognize the allusion through prior familiarity with the text being alluded to and to consider the possible relationships that might exist between the two texts. Since allusions are meant to be recognized through a reader’s own efforts and prior knowledge of the text being cited, their use presupposes the existence of a canon, a shared body of texts that are familiar to readers. Authors who use allusion rely on the audience’s ability to recognize and interpret the allusions. By using allusions, authors become active participants in literary history and tradition and invite readers to join them. Global allusions invoke an entire world view. Biblical allusions offer an interpretive framework to understand characters and situations as moral archetypes. Allusions can be directed towards virtually all readers or a select informed subset. These types of allusions all may be found in the spirituals and in the later texts that allude to the spirituals. By means of allusion, the spirituals provide early and indisputable proof of the existence of a self-referring African American literary tradition, and the intent of their creators to insert African American voices into the canon. They are talking back and talking themselves into a tradition.

When later authors allude to the spirituals, which are already alluding to prior literary tradition, the canon grows and perpetuates using ancient devices for highly original purposes of bold self-assertion in dialogue with the cultural power center. We have early and clear proof of the existence of an African American canon in which the spirituals played a key role in inserting African American voices, perspectives, and experiences into literary tradition. The spirituals are a source of citation and allusion in all genres of African American writing and oratory—plays, essays, songs, music, religious texts, fiction—from the nineteenth century to the present. In the genre of poetry, we find the African American tradition suffused with the spirituals’ influence in myriads of ways. There are echoes of structural components of the spirituals, including call-and-response, and devices of repetition, including words, phrases, and refrains. There are direct and indirect citations to the words of specific spirituals. Applications appear of the resonant Old and New Testament stories as used in the spirituals such as Noah’s Ark, climbing Jacob’s ladder, the suffering and crucified Jesus, Psalms, Proverbs, Daniel and the Lion, Ezekiel and the Wheel, Moses and the Exodus, the vision of heavenly battle and reward in Revelation, and travel to the Promised Land. There are global allusions to major themes including retribution on sinners, being good and holy in one’s heart, hypocritical Christians, bonds and reuniting with family and loved ones, serving God, praying for strength and fortitude, and the stony road to freedom.

The spirituals serve as resounding echoes, allusions, and formal models throughout the African American poetry tradition. The prosodic structures of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in “Ethiopia” owe as much or more to the forms and themes of the spirituals as to the conventional prosody of the Anglo-American canon. In “Eliza Harris,” a phrase like “aided by Heaven, she gained a free shore” (st. 7) echoes a major theme of many spirituals such as “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down, Moses.” Harper’s “Songs for the People” (later echoed in “For My People” by Margaret Walker) articulates the central theme of many spirituals that poems are intended to serve as balm for the whole community, especially those who are suffering. We find unmistakable themes of retribution and deliverance as well as the echoic structures of spirituals in W.E.B. Du Bois’s “A Litany of Atlanta” with the vivid imagism of a phrase like “Red was the midnight” evoking “De moon run down in a purple stream” in “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” In “When Malindy Sings,” Paul Laurence Dunbar famously alludes to the spirituals as a genre, and directly cites the mosaic phrase (to employ Barton’s useful term) “Come to Jesus”⁸ and the spiritual “Rock of Ages.” “When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home” by Sterling A. Brown similarly alludes to the cultural centrality of the entire genre and uses “When the Saints Go Marching In” as the extended metaphor on which the poem is built. Robert Hayden’s “Runagate Runagate” alludes to numerous embedded specific spirituals, themes, and wandering choruses to drive the narrative core of this lyric poem mirroring the way the spirituals themselves conveyed powerful subtextual messages. Hayden’s poem contains citations to “Many Thousand Gone” (“Many thousand rise and go/many thousands crossing over”), “No More Auction Block for Me” (No more auction block for me/no more driver’s lash for me”), “Oh Freedom!” (“And before I’ll be a slave/I’ll be buried in my grave”), “I’m On My Way” (“I’m bound for the freedom, freedom-bound”), the direct address of Ezekiel (“Tell me, Ezekiel”), God’s deliverance (“Jehovah coming to deliver me”), and “Bound for Glory” (“Come ride-a my train”). Margaret Walker’s renowned anthem “For My People” refers in the opening line to “my people” […] “singing their slave songs.” “The Bones of My Father” by Etheridge Knight is a response to “Dry Bones.” “Harriet in the Promised Land” (from the 1938–1940 Harriet Tubman Series by Jacob Lawrence) by Sam Cornish is a global allusion to the spirituals’ heavenly reward imagery and the conditions of their performance (“she kneels/like a slave/in church/like a slave preparing to dance”). In Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” the poem’s major theme and repeated message are delivered through the insistent repetition of “I rise,” including as the closing triplet, which echoes themes and devices that dominate spirituals such as “Oh Freedom!” “Study the Masters” by Lucille Clifton ends “if you had heard her/chanting as she ironed/you would understand form and line,” an homage to anonymous women poets who sang as they worked, which surely applies to the creators of the spirituals.

Fenton Johnson’s collection Visions of the Dusk contains a section of ten poems titled “Negro Spirituals.” “The Lonely Mother (A Negro Spiritual),” “Singing Hallelujia (A Negro Spiritual),” and other examples such as “De Ol’ Home” and “Who Is That A-Walking in the Corn” are explicit global and formal allusions to spirituals. “Keep on Pushing” by David Henderson takes its title and theme from the song by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions which articulates a key concept and wandering chorus of several spirituals, notably “Keep a-Inching Along” and “Don’t You Let Nobody Turn You Around.” “Spyrytual” by Russell Atkins is an extended allusion to “Oh Didn’t It Rain” in the form of a visual poem. “Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin’s Spiritual” by Douglas Kearney signifies on “Wade in the Water,” an allusion which is further heightened by Kearney’s performance of the poem as a song. “All God’s Chillun” by Kamau Brathwaite takes its title from the spiritual by that name. A mocking evocation of slavery-era and Jim Crow racism, it signifies on phrases and themes of other spirituals (notably “Go Down, Moses” and “All God’s Chillun”) by turning the tables from prayerful human supplication to God’s failures to protect them from whips, torment, and lynching (“These my children?/God, you hear them?”; “an’ let’s get to hell out’a Pharoah’s land!”). Julie Ezelle Patton’s “When the Saints Go” is a postmodern elegy, tribute, and interleaving of themes and phrases constructively re-purposing the themes and lexical materiality of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Patton’s “Revelation” is a virtual postmodern deconstruction of the apocalyptic themes, phrases, and images that are such strong identifiers of the unique operations of the spirituals.

Perhaps the most famous poem written about the spirituals is “O Black and Unknown Bards” by James Weldon Johnson, which is the epigraph of the Preface to The Book of American Negro Spirituals (Johnson and Johnson 1925). The poem’s theme is a Romantic meditation in the form of an ode or elegy addressed to the lost and anonymous creators of the spirituals—“O black slave singers, gone, forgot, unfamed”—and the mystical force that inspired them to produce these poems. Its six octaves suggest cantos as music dominates each stanza: “minstrel’s lyre,” “burst into song,” “melody,” “melodic,” “note in music,” “ears,” “reed,” “bars,” “trumpet-call,” “tones,” “singers,” “sang,” “strings,” “chord,” “music empyrean.” The structure is ottava rima using iambic pentameter lines with a slightly differentiating variant in the rhyme scheme from the Byronic pattern, notably minus the double rhyme closing couplet (ababcdcdcd in Johnson’s poem versus the abababcc pattern of Don Juan). Here we have a clear evocation of the canonical Anglo-American poetry tradition, but particularly the Romantic vision of the inspired gifted individual poet whose “lips […] touch the sacred fire of divine poetic transport” (st. 1).

The poets are apostrophized and pluralized into a group in this poem, as we see from the title and as a continuing theme throughout the poem: “O Black and unknown bards of long ago,/How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?” (st. 1) The third person plural also used in the title and first stanza (“bards”) is juxtaposed with a singular “he” in both stanzas one and two, where the speaker imagines with increasing vividness the model of this poet-bard. The poem continues the pattern of play with pronouns and referents in the penultimate stanza (“O black slave singers […] You—you alone…”). An indeterminate second-person address in the final stanza refers to the imagined poet(s) of long ago in both individual and group identities: “You sang far better than you knew;” (st. 6) and the famed closing line, “You sang a race […].” The mode of address in this poem evokes the Anglo-American canonical tradition while it simultaneously underscores the inextricable connection between the individual poet-griot and their community in the African and African American traditions.

Using a conventional Western prosodic pattern rather than the spirituals’ structure suggests that Johnson’s purpose is to incorporate these African American literary jewels into the Western canon by naturalizing the model of the specially anointed poet-singer. We see this motive elsewhere in Johnson of directly comparing African American poetry with Romantic canonical models, such as in his introduction to The Book of American Negro Poetry where he admiringly situates Dunbar among Burns and others in the Romantic tradition while demeaning Wheatley for following the models of Pope and Gray rather than Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, or Shelley (Johnson 1922). We also see Johnson’s employment of the Romantic model of the specially gifted poet-singer as an un-self-conscious natural vessel of poetry. While Johnson describes the spirituals as the voice of a race, he also believed that “the far greater part of them is the work of talented individuals influenced by the pressure and reaction of the group” and consistently utilizes the term “bard” for these “individual talented makers” (Johnson and Johnson 1925, p. 21). This mode of citing the spirituals in modern and postmodern frameworks preserves them as historical references points, living creative material, and sources to cite and preserve within the conventions of the mainstream canon. Johnson formally, thematically, and emphatically inserts African American poetry into the canonical English language tradition. At the same time, he fuses both traditions by honoring the solitary poet as an inspired individual while emphasizing the essential importance of the group in African American culture as integral to social, communicative, and aesthetic processes and life itself.

Spirituals as lyric poetry record the enslaved poets’ ability to overcome adversity and illuminate the strength of pre-Emancipation society in achieving unprecedented cultural production under circumstances of unimaginable hardship. Viewing them mainly as folk music from a misty past disrespects and misrepresents their significance as living cultural artifacts, as records of a historical moment whose sad legacy prevails, as a major body of triumphal poetry resisting oppression, and as timeless expressions of the human capacity to overcome and move on. The finest examples stand up to anything produced in the American poetry tradition. As illustrious American artefacts, Du Bois accurately called them “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas.” In the spirituals, Mark Twain believed that “America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages.” If preservation, citation, recreation, and allusion are regarded as hallmarks of literary and cultural canonization, the spirituals have earned their hallowed place.