CHAPTER 44
Jubilees and Jubilation: The African American Spiritual Tradition
OVERVIEW
This chapter addresses the vernacular and cultivated traditions of American music during the
nineteenth century, focusing on the African American spiritual as derived from the camp meeting
and Jubilee traditions of the nineteenth century. The story of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
illustrates the complex, cross-cultural history of the spiritual and emphasizes the reconfigurations
that spirituals often undergo as they are disseminated aurally and through musical notation.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. To understand the spiritual within the camp-meeting and Jubilee traditions of the nineteenth
century
2. To understand the role that the art-song tradition played as spirituals were arranged with
musical notation
3. To recognize Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as the product of a complex, cross-cultural musical
history
LECTURE SUGGESTIONS
1. Review with your students the different historical and performing contexts of spirituals: the
early nineteenth-century camp meeting and the later notated arrangements such as those by
Harry T. Burleigh. Using Swing Low, Sweet Chariot as an example, discuss the different
musical approaches of the version by the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Burleigh’s arrangement.
2. Guide your students through a listening of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, focusing on the
pentatonic character of the melody. Review pentatonicism (Chapter 4) and discuss the
different moods and characterizations generated by tonal and pentatonic melodies. As the
textbook notes, white Northerners who heard spirituals sung around the time of the Civil
War were struck by the “foreignness” of these songs (p. 244). Ask students whether they
can relate their experiences of tonality vs. pentatonicism to the historical notions of musical
exoticism?
ASSIGNMENT SUGGESTIONS
1. Review in the textbook the history of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. How did this spiritual
come to be? What does this example tell us about the connections between race, religion,
and music in America during the nineteenth century?
2. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot has been covered in versions that range from an updated Fisk
Jubilee Singers rendition backed by a large orchestra to gospel-pop (Sam Cooke) to folk
(Leadbelly, Pete Seeger) to reggae (Eric Clapton). Search for recordings of this spiritual
from a variety of genres. How do the meanings of the song and its lyrical content, as
interpreted by these various artists, change from version to version?
TEACHING CHALLENGES
A challenge here is to present the material in a way that exposes the complex cultural forces at
work in the creation of the spiritual repertory while acknowledging the spiritual tradition as a
distinctive African American art form.
SUPPLEMENTAL REPERTORY
Burleigh: Spirituals
Coleridge-Taylor: Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (1905)
John Wesley Work Jr. and Frederick J. Work, New Jubilee Songs and Folk Songs of the
American Negro (1907)
SUPPLEMENTAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural
Interpretation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. A critical look at the white
interest in African American spirituals at the end of the nineteenth century and its
implications for later claims of cultural authenticity.
Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Rev. paperback
ed. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Chapters 11 and 12 outline the
history of African American sacred music in the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
Jubilees and Jubilation: The African American Spiritual Tradition (Chapter 44)
I. Spirituals and the Jubilee Tradition
A. Second Great Awakening: Christian movement, early 1800s
1. camp meetings: sing songs of worship
a. lasted days, weeks
b. African Americans, European Americans gathered
c. hymns of praise to popular or folk tunes
2. ring shout: extended call and response
a. developed from African traditions
3. spiritual tradition
a. camp meetings of slaves, freedmen
b. worship, subversive political endeavor
c. community, solidarity: monophonic singing
B. Fisk Jubilee Singers
1. post-Civil War, freed slaves at Fisk University
2. toured US and Europe, sang arrangements of spirituals
II. Spirituals and the Art-Song Tradition
A. Harry T. Burleigh: African American composer, singer, editor
1. “art–song” arrangements of spirituals
a. voice-and-piano settings
b. published 1910s
c. concert staples, black and white singers
B. Overlapped with Harlem Renaissance
1. movement celebrating African American culture and arts
C. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
1. origins:
a. possibly by Wallace Willis; slave in Indian country of the West
b. 1840s: heard by Alexander Reid, white minister
c. suggested to Fisk Jubilee Singers by Reid
2. reconfiguration by black composers, singers
a. favorite of the Fisk Singers: recorded several times
b. arranged many times as art song
3. Elijah taken to Heaven
a. biblical text: Second Book of Kings
b. melody uses pentatonic scale
c. several repetitions, text and music
D. Listening Guide 33: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (1840s; arrangements 1911, 1917)
1. duple meter, flexible syncopations
2. Fisk arrangement:
a. strophic, first stanza as refrain
b. TTBB male quartet
c. simple harmonies
d. homophonic texture, lead singer
3. Burleigh arrangement/recomposition:
a. A-B-C-A´
b. soprano and piano
c. blues and jazz harmonies
d. polyphonic interaction: piano, voice