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David Spencer's We Shall Not Be Moved

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The Special Collections Department of Mullins Library at The University of Arkansas houses hidden treasures in regards to American music. Items throughout the department include primary sources such as diaries, pictures, musical scores, books, and notes. I have been interested in African-American spiritual music and after looking through many collections, I decided to research this topic. I found many interesting books written about African-American spirituals which contained authentic musical examples. These books include “The Negro Forget Me Not Songster,” “American Ballads and Folk Songs,” and “Religious Folk Songs of the Negro” written in 1844, 1927, and 1934 respectively. These objects relate to American music because they contain original musical examples and scores of African-American music compiled by their various authors.
Originally, I intended to research the music of William Grant Still and Florence Price while …show more content…

David Spencer writes a brilliant book titled “We Shall Not Be Moved” which includes a chapter about the use of black spirituals in the United States south. Spencer explains how “Africans sang of their experiences as slaves and infused them with messages of Christian redemption in the thousands of songs they created for themselves, known collectively as spirituals.” Spencer continues by explaining how the topics of spirituals included the horrors of racial exploitation and messages of liberation associated with their masters’ Protestant Christian views. M. Shawn Copeland argues that “on plantations, religion was the sphere in which the enslaved Africans were able to exercise some measure of autonomy and freedom.” He claims that slaves would risk punishment for freedom in religion as they regularly held independent and unsupervised worship services. In these services, slaves formed poems and later music, allowing them the slightest bit of

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