Spirituals

The Cotton Pickers by Winslow Homer (1876)

In many cases, enslaved plantation workers in the nineteenth-century American South were forbidden from congregating together freely. Plantation owners tended to fear the thought of enslaved persons gathering together and rising up against them. One common exception to this policy tended to be prayer meetings. These, therefore, became the natural forum for the early emergence of a uniquely African-American culture.

As enslaved persons often came from diverse African backgrounds, points of cultural convergence tended to be the difficulties of plantation life, Christianity, and some shared musical traditions. Musical techniques inherited from African tradition included communal singing, pitch-bending, and call-and-response format. Biblical themes - especially Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery - were popular topics of song, and became known as Spirituals. Also common were lyrics about misfortune and hardship, which eventually led to the development of the Blues. These songs began as simple monophonic melodies, but over time often developed more complex harmonies. Like Classical music, these tended to focus on the tonic (I), subdominant (IV), and dominant (V) chords.