Spiritual

Spirituals are the sacred folk songs created by enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South, the first distinctly American religious music to reach a worldwide audience. Sung a cappella in call-and-response or close harmony, their melodies draw on West African song and Euro-American hymnody, while the texts rework biblical narratives — Exodus, deliverance, crossing Jordan — into a coded language of suffering and hope. Arranged for the concert stage by the *Fisk Jubilee Singers* in the 1870s and codified by composers such as *H. T. Burleigh*, the spiritual became the foundation from which gospel music grew and a permanent part of the classical recital repertoire.