The Sanctified Church By Zora Neale Hurston
Spirituals were born out of the experiences of the African Americans slaves in the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. They often described the hardships these people faced while being enslaved, and some gave hope that one day things would get better for the slaves. From these spirituals, we can see many other forms of music influenced today, both black music and American music alike.
Originally, these spirituals were only sung by the slaves acapella, without instruments to accompany their voices. As time passed, most spirituals were set to music, and arranged with instruments in mind. This is where we can see the first influence of the Euro-American musical tradition on Negro spirituals: instrumentation.
Take for instance
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The song has elements of jazz, folk music, and the blues in it, which are all influenced by traditional African music. After a number of choruses sung by Eva Cassidy, there is a trumpet that takes a solo. This solo was most likely improvised, and improvised solos are a main staple of American jazz music.
Another characteristic of many modern arrangements of Negro spiritual is the harmony. The original slave spirituals weren’t very harmonically complex by European standards. In her novel “The Sanctified Church” Zora Neale Hurston describes the harmony of Negro spirituals,
“The jagged harmony is what makes it, and it ceases to be what it was when this is absent. Neither can any group be trained to produce it. Its truth dies under training like flowers under hot water. The harmony of the true spiritual is not regular. The dissonances are important and not to be ironed out by the trained musician. The various parts break in at any old time. Falsetto often takes the place of regular voices for short periods. Keys change. Moreover, each singing of the piece is a new creation. The congregation is bound by no rules. No two times singing is alike, so that we must consider the rendition of a song not a final thing, but as a mood. It will not be the same thing next Sunday. Negro songs to be heard truly must be sung by a group, and a group bent on expression of feelings and not on sound
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