Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 197world, / Troubles of the world, troubles of the world,” announces another spiritual,
“No more weepin’ and a-wailing, / I’m goin’ to live with God.” The often colorful
accounts of just how easeful this afterlife would be – “Eatin’ hone and drinkin’ wine /
Marchin’ roun de throne / Wid Peter, James, and John” – imply a bitter criticism of
the care, labor, and injustice that the singers are suffering in the here and now. Most
of the spirituals are not about an easeful Jesus, however, but about the God of the
Old Testament, His heroes and prophets; and many of them work toward a vision of
redemption, even revenge, in this life here on earth. Songs like “Nobody Knows the
Trouble I’ve Had” tend to elide spiritual trouble with the terrible, troublesome suf-
fering of the slave; “Steal Away to Jesus” quietly carries the promise of flight in the
repeated phrase “I ain’t got long to stay here”; while songs such as “Deep River” and
“Roll, Jordan, Roll” make an only slightly veiled connection between the journey
into the Promised Land, made by the Chosen People, and the deliverance of slaves
into their own promised land of freedom, in the Northern states or Canada. Other
spirituals are even more open in expressing their dreams of liberation. “Didn’t my
Lord deliver Daniel, / And why not every man?” asks one song. “When Israel was in
Egypt’s land,” the caller would have cried out when singing “Go Down, Moses”;
to which the response would have come, “Let my people go.” “Go Down, Moses” was
sufficiently frank in its demand for freedom to be banned on most slave plantations.
It usually had to be sung out of earshot of the slaveholder. So, quite certainly, did the
spiritual called simply, “Oh, Freedom,” which repeats the declaration, “An’ befo’ I’d
be a slave, / I’ll be buried in my grave,” or “No More Auction Block:”No more auction block for me,
No more, no more,
No more auction block for me,
Many thousands gone.“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days,” W. E. B. Du Bois was to
write in 1903, “– Sorrow Songs – for they were weary at heart.” As Du Bois saw it,
these songs, “the rhythmic cry of the slave,” were “the singular spiritual heritage of
the nation” and “the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side
of the seas.” Even reading them in cold print, without benefit of performance, it is
difficult to disagree.
As oral performances, of anonymous authorship and designed to be sung by
various communities and generations, spirituals exist in many different versions.
The same is true of the white folk songs of the period. “Bury Me Not on the Lone
Prairie,” for instance, originated as a lament about burial at sea, probably in
the 1840s. It was then carried westward and, with the vastness of the open ranges of
the West substituted for the vastness of the ocean, became one of the most popular
early cowboy songs. The differences between spirituals and white folk songs are at
least as important as the connections, however. Spirituals describe dreams of flight
and the reality of “slavery chains forlorn.” White songs, by contrast, are often about
wandering in search of wealth or work. “Did you ever hear of Sweet Betty fromGGray_c02.indd 197ray_c 02 .indd 197 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM