Honoring Music of our Past: Arranging Traditional African-American Spirituals

Abstract

The process of arranging these spirituals began with researching recordings of former slaves singing spirituals and songs’ histories through diaries within the Library of Congress. Because spirituals were sung throughout the South, any plantation or region might have had its own variation of a spiritual with a melody and verses slightly different to a neighboring area. Recordings and transcriptions were conducted across the South following the end of the Civil War by early musicologists whose desire to document and preserve this music has kept the genre alive. [From Introduction]