Long-Held Beliefs Disspelled Here!

Well, second- or thirdhand . . .

"Musicologist Eileen Southern has disproved the view that spirituals were born in the fields of southern plantations. Instead, she argues, they originated in the worship of independent black congregations in the Philadelphia area. The crucial source is an early hymnbook compiled by Richard Allen, a former slave who became the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Printed in 1801 in Philadelphia, Allen’s A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns, Selected from Various Authors took its title from a phrase in Psalm 150, 'hymns and spiritual songs,' perhaps following on the standard collection by that name by the eighteenth-century English hymnist Isaac Watts. It was the first collection of sacred song that was highly regarded by black Christians and the first to include the 'wandering choruses'—short refrains attached randomly to standard hymn stanzas—that were characteristic of black song. Critically, Southern has traced texts in the landmark collection Slave Songs of the United States (1867) back to Allen’s hymnbook."