Aesthetics and Utilitarian Values of Selected African American Negro Spirituals and Gospel Songs

This study examines African American songs as an embodiment of black American identity, experience, socio-economic realities, and African Americans‟ perception of the world located as they are within the American society. Although, the subject of African American Music has produced a large and varied literature, the inattention to questions of beauty and functions of the songs seem to neglect the contribution and distinctiveness of the genre in addressing the African American crisis and predicament. In an attempt to fill this gap, the study focuses on selected songs of two song types belonging to the black tradition − Spirituals and early Gospel Songs of Charles Albert Tindley and Thomas Dorsey − as forms which widely explain the circumstances of black life in white dominated America. In particular, the study attempts to establish the aesthetic and utilitarian values of the aforesaid song types. In order to achieve the goals of the study, twelve songs are analysed: six songs from each song style.

They include “De Winter‟ll Soon be Ober,” “I Got Shoes,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “We are Clim‟in‟ Jacob‟s Ladder,”“Crucifixion,” and “Soon I Will Be Done.” Others include: “I‟ll Overcome Someday,” “We‟ll Understand It Better By and By,” “Here I May Be Weak and Poor (God Will Provide for Me),”“Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” “Peace in the Valley” and “I‟m Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Song.” A close scrutiny of the songs reveals two important issues. The first illustrates that the two vernacular styles, developed at different times and environments, provide and at times share a definitive set of aesthetic and stylistic features. Some of them include: allegory, allusion, rhyme, repetition, verse and chorus structure, call-and-response pattern, improvisation, amongst others. Second, the artistic forms − Negro Spiritual and Gospel Songs, − beyond their religious functions, serve as expressive outlets of social, cultural and political circumstances of African American life within the United States.

To drive the point home, Postcolonial theory is employed as a theoretical tool. This framework facilitates the examination of the colonial experience of African Americans in terms of the oppressive form of slavery and its effects on their social and cultural spheres. It also examines the way the two musical styles under study serve as African Americans‟ creative, artistic responses and subtle forms of resistance to the oppressions and race-based discrimination in the mainland of America. This approach in the study stretches backwards from the colonial past of American slavery to the dynamics of neo-colonialism in the early decades of the twentieth century.