Chicago a cappella presents "Roll, Jordan, Roll" on Feb. 6, 7, 13, and 14. 
 
How did the African-American spiritual come about?  Here are some thoughts about the social background and history of the spiritual, from my program notes for these upcoming performances.   
 
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The central characteristic of the spiritual is “the moan”—that fundamental grounding in the sorrow of a people who were subjected to cruelty as a matter of course.  Nevertheless, I always feel better after singing a spiritual.  It doesn’t matter much what the text is.  I would guess that spirituals affect others in similar ways.  I even feel better after listening to spirituals, if I’m not singing.  Other writers have praised the deep quality of spirituals wherein they affirm our common humanity; and once again there is that quality of “we,” that we are not alone, not even in our suffering. 
 
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We don’t know exactly how the spirituals came about.  Perhaps they were written in different ways.  Maybe there was a single slave working in a field humming to himself or herself and working out words and melodies, and the person with the idea would work them out in small groups or teach the new idea to others back in the cabin at the end of the work day.  Some of the songs may have begun life as riffs from melodies brought over from Africa, with new words added in as slaves learned biblical stories and their message of deliverance from bondage.
 
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More likely to me, however is a sense that the spiritual was from the beginning a group effort.  We know that there was a huge wave of hymn-writing that occurred during the camp-meeting revival movement of the early 1800s—the result of thousands of people worshipping together.  We also have countless stories of slaves secretly going to secluded places in the woods and performing the “ring shout,” a form of song and dance with an ecstatic release.  The ring shout had a special power that seems to have truly threatened slaveowners to the point where the practice was banned, hence the need to perform it in secret.  Scholars talk over and over about the ring shout as the truest form of African-American spirituality and the locus of its power—and, at the risk of stating the obvious, you cannot have a ring shout without a ring of people.

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It was right after the end of the Civil War that the African-American spiritual began its long move from the plantation to the concert hall.  White slaveholders in the South had been mostly uninterested in their workers’ music, except as it might help them become better Christians.  However, Northern abolitionists started collecting the slaves’ songs before the end of the Civil War, and the first published book of Negro spirituals was issued in 1867 under the title Slave Songs of the United States.  As early as 1852, transcriptions of slave songs were being sent to one of the volume’s editors, Lucy McKim Garrison, by her uncle John, who lived in Georgetown, Delaware.  In fact, the farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania, owned by Ms. Garrison’s grandfather Micajah Speakman, was a stop on the Underground Railroad.  You can read more of the wonderful story in Sinful Tunes and Spirituals:  Black Folk Music to the Civil War by Dena Epstein, one of the most important scholarly volumes ever written on the development of the spiritual.

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