Black Spirituals: Their Emergence into Public Knowledge

Before the Civil War, people outside the black community were only dimly aware that a body of song called spirituals existed. To most whites in the United States and Europe, the music of the blacks was the music of the minstrel theater, songs like "Old Black Joe" or "My Old Kentucky Home." European travelers who visited the South expected to find the slaves singing such songs, and sometimes that's what they heard, for minstrel songs were universally popular and some of them entered the oral tradition (Bremer 1924, 141-142; White 1928). That an Afro-American folk music existed was reported by some travelers, but its existence was not widely known. With the outbreak of the war, the closed society that had existed in the South was shattered. For the first time people sympathetic to the plight of the slaves from the North were able to go south. Newspaper correspondents, missionaries, teachers, and army officers came into contact with the black population of the South, and reports of the slaves' singing and dancing were very newsworthy. An area that received much attention was the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and