Traditional

The African American spiritual is one of the great bodies of folk music: sacred songs created by enslaved people in the American South, fusing African musical roots with Christian texts, and carrying coded messages of faith, endurance and the longing for freedom. Passed down orally and later collected, arranged and brought to the concert stage (notably by composers such as Harry Burleigh and William L. Dawson), the spirituals are foundational to American music, feeding into gospel, blues and jazz. They are credited simply to ‘Traditional,’ their individual authors lost to history.