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The collectors of the songs were Northern abolitionists William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware. [3] The group transcribed songs sung by the Gullah Geechee people of Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. [4] These people were newly freed slaves who were living in a refugee camp when these songs were collected. [5]
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.
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, [1] Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, [2] [3] [4] which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade [5] and for centuries afterwards, through ...
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 ...
During slavery, these songs were coded messages that spoke of escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad and were sung by enslaved African Americans in plantation fields to send coded messages to other slaves, unbeknownst to the slaveholders. [21]
Many of the women's songs discuss their past and present suffering under slavery and prospects for freedom. Enslaved women sang songs to their children about slavery, [1] and work songs and lullabies sung by enslaved women commented on the gendered dynamic of slavery. One song speaks of a family being torn apart by sales:
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.
The song was sung in the 1800s in an expression of the desire to be released from slavery, and was also frequently sung at funerals - which continues today. ... to have been subjected to Swing Low ...