Spirituals

Spirituals are the sacred folk songs created by enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South, the foundational repertoire of African American music. Sung in work, worship and the ring shout, they join biblical narrative — Exodus, Jordan, chariots and deliverance — to the experience of slavery, in call-and-response melodies built for communal singing and later harmonised for concert performance. Arranged by *Harry T. Burleigh* and carried worldwide by the *Fisk Jubilee Singers*, *Paul Robeson* and *Marian Anderson*, the spiritual became America's first internationally recognised folk art and the root source of gospel, blues and soul.