100 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
stupid.” To his ear, the men’s singing was “uncouth,” the women’s nothing more
than a “detestable burthen... screamed... on one single note.” Perhaps it was
the strangeness of the whole affair that moved Latrobe to give so full an account,
for he guessed that the singing “was in some African language,” commenting
that “such amusements of Sunday have, it seems, perpetuated here those of
Africa among its inhabitants.”THE MUSIC OF BLACK WORSHIP
In addition to adapting the congregational singing practices of white churches,
African American converts to Christianity created their own distinctive music
for worship. Blending aspects of African and European music, just as they
blended aspects of Christianity and African religions, black worshipers used
these new sacred genres to express a uniquely African American religious expe-
rience. The music of black worship would have signifi cant consequences as even
more varieties of black music, and new audiences for that music, began to grow
after the Civil War.SPIRITUALS AND SHOUTS
Throughout the nineteenth century, white visitors to the South recorded their
impressions of slave music in travel accounts. Here are found early descriptions
of spirituals, African American sacred songs rooted in the experience of slav-
ery. Peter Neilson, a Scottish trader who visited Charleston, South Carolina, in
the 1820s, observed that “upon the evening of a Sunday, the song of praise may
frequently be heard to issue from the hovel of the Negro, whilst all is quiet in the
mansions of the wealthy.” According to Neilson, the songs lacked the propriety of
white hymn singing: “The religious fervor of the Negroes does not always break
forth in strains the most reverential or refi ned.”
But not all white descriptions of slave spirituals are disapproving. A native
South Carolinian, Alexander D. Sims, delighted in hearing “the songs of Zion,
at a distance, caroled in tones of sweetest melody by many co-mingled voices.”
At such times, “native harmony outvies instructed skill... such is the melody
with which night after night the Negroes charm the ear.” Ironically, his descrip-
tion comes from an 1834 pamphlet defending slavery as a moral institution.
Compounding the irony is Sims’s apparent unawareness that the words of many
spirituals draw parallels between the Israelites’ bondage and American slavery.
Charlotte Brooks, a former slave, recalled in 1890 that as a child in Virginia she
had heard a minister singing, “O where are the Hebrew children? Safe in the
promised land”—words that make veiled reference to the free states in the North.
Another spiritual she remembered also used images from the Bible that offered
comfort to those longing for freedom:
My God delivered Daniel, Daniel, Daniel
My God delivered Daniel,
And why not deliver me too?
He delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
Jonah from the belly of the whale,the spiritual172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 100 23/01/13 10:07 AM