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"Hymns, English -- United States -- History and criticism"
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American Lazarus : religion and the rise of African-American and native American literatures
The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America.Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, \"the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust.\" This book explores the means by which the very first Black and Indian authors rose up.
eBook
Sing them over again to me : hymns and hymnbooks in America
Hymns and hymnbooks as American historical and cultural icons. This work is a study of the importance of Protestant hymns in defining America and American religion. It explores the underappreciated influence of hymns in shaping many spheres of personal and corporate life as well as the value of hymns for studying religious life. Distinguishing features of this volume are studies of the most popular hymns (“Amazing Grace,” “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”), with attention to the ability of such hymns to reveal, as they are altered and adapted, shifts in American popular religion. The book also focuses attention on the role hymns play in changing attitudes about race, class, gender, economic life, politics, and society.
eBook
Nothing but Love in God’s Water
Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God’s Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and on through the Montgomery bus boycott. This second volume continues the journey, chronicling the role this music played in energizing and sustaining those most heavily involved in the civil rights movement.
Robert Darden, former gospel music editor for Billboard magazine and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University, brings this vivid, vital story to life. He explains why black sacred music helped foster community within the civil rights movement and attract new adherents; shows how Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders used music to underscore and support their message; and reveals how the songs themselves traveled and changed as the fight for freedom for African Americans continued. Darden makes an unassailable case for the importance of black sacred music not only to the civil rights era but also to present-day struggles in and beyond the United States.
Taking us from the Deep South to Chicago and on to the nation’s capital, Darden’s grittily detailed, lively telling is peppered throughout with the words of those who were there, famous and forgotten alike: activists such as Rep. John Lewis, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Willie Bolden, as well as musical virtuosos such as Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, and The Mighty Wonders. Expertly assembled from published and unpublished writing, oral histories, and rare recordings, this is the history of the soundtrack that fueled the long march toward freedom and equality for the black community in the United States and that continues to inspire and uplift people all over the world.
eBook
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry
Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/
eBook
Gullah Spirituals
In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah
Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height
as songs for social change and Black identity in the twentieth
century American South. While much has been done to study,
preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the lowcountry and sea
islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the
shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten. This work,
which focuses primarily on South Carolina's St. Helena Island,
illuminates the remarkable history, survival, and influence of
spirituals since the earliest recordings in the 1860s.
Grounded in an oral tradition with a dynamic and evolving
character, spirituals proved equally adaptable for use during
social and political unrest and in unlikely circumstances. Most
notably, the island's songs were used at the turn of the century to
help rally support for the United States' involvement in World War
I and to calm racial tensions between black and white soldiers. In
the 1960s, civil rights activists adopted spirituals as freedom
songs, though many were unaware of their connection to the
island.
Gullah Spirituals uses fieldwork, personal recordings, and oral
interviews to build upon earlier studies and includes an appendix
with more than fifty transcriptions of St. Helena spirituals, many
no longer performed and more than half derived from Crawford's own
transcriptions. Through this work, Crawford hopes to restore the
cultural memory lost to time while tracing the long arc and
historical significance of the St. Helena spirituals.
eBook
Spiritual Interrogations
The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast. The formation of an early African American community, bound together by shared experiences and spiritual values, owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their writings would be profound for all African Americans' sense of their own identity as a people.
Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to 1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture and emerging free black communities. Her study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and community--focuses on four women: the poet Phillis Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and Shaker eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with African Methodism.
Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a \"spirituals matrix,\" which transformed existing literary genres to accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were cocreators, with all black women who followed, of African American intellectual life.
eBook
Songs of Sorrow
In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. During her stay she heard the singing of the slaves in their churches, as they rowed their boats from island to island, and as they worked and played. Already a skilled musician, she determined to preserve as much of the music as she could, quickly writing down words and melodies, some of them only fleeting improvisations. Upon her return to Philadelphia, she began composing musical settings for the songs and in the fall of 1862 published the first serious musical arrangements of slave songs. She also wrote about the musical characteristics of slave songs, and published, in a leading musical journal of the time, the first article to discuss what she had witnessed. In Songs of Sorrow: Lucy McKim Garrison and \"Slave Songs of the United States, \" renowned music scholar Samuel Charters tells McKim's personal story. Letters reveal the story of young women's lives during the harsh years of the war. At the same time that her arrangements of the songs were being published, a man with whom she had an unofficial \"attachment\" was killed in battle, and the war forced her to temporarily abandon her work. In 1865 she married Wendell Phillips Garrison, son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and in the early months of their marriage she proposed that they turn to the collection of slave songs that had long been her dream. She and her husband—a founder and literary editor of the recently launched journal The Nation —enlisted the help of two associates who had also collected songs in the Sea Islands. Their book, Slave Songs of the United States, appeared in 1867. After a long illness, ultimately ending in paralysis, she died at the age of thirty-four in 1877. This book reclaims the story of a pioneer in ethnomusicology, one whose influential work affected the Fisk Jubilee Singers and many others.
eBook
Marian Musings: Reflections on Blessed Virgins in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry
John Sitter argues that the gender of personifications in eighteenth-century English poetry is cognitively significant rather than merely conventional or “grammatical,” and that many of the “celestial” maids described in quasi-religious terms in the period's poetry function as permissibly secularized versions of the Blessed Virgin—in a country suspicious of any leaning toward Mariolatry. Poets considered include Chudleigh, Prior, Parnell, Watts, Akenside, Thomas Warton, Collins, Smart, Carter, and Chatterton.
Journal Article