Beloved spirituals include such lasting favorites as All God's Children Got Shoes, Balm in Gilead, Deep River, Down by the Riverside, Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, Gimme That Ol'-Time Religion, He's Got the Whole World in His Hand, Roll, Jordan, Roll, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Steal Away to Jesus, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, This Train, Wade in the Water, We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? and many more. Excellent for sing-alongs, community programs, church functions, and other events.

In Gullah Spirituals musicologist Eric Crawford traces Gullah Geechee songs from their beginnings in West Africa to their height as songs for social change and Black identity in the twentieth century American South. While much has been done to study, preserve, and interpret Gullah culture in the lowcountry and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, some traditions like the shouting and rowing songs have been all but forgotten. This work, which focuses primarily on South Carolina's St. Helena Island, illuminates the remarkable history, survival, and influence of spirituals since the earliest recordings in the 1860s. Grounded in an oral tradition with a dynamic and evolving character, spirituals proved equally adaptable for use during social and political unrest and in unlikely circumstances. Most notably, the island's songs were used at the turn of the century to help rally support for the United States' involvement in World War I and to calm racial tensions between black and white soldiers. In the 1960s, civil rights activists adopted spirituals as freedom songs, though many were unaware of their connection to the island. Gullah Spirituals uses fieldwork, personal recordings, and oral interviews to build upon earlier studies and includes an appendix with more than fifty transcriptions of St. Helena spirituals, many no longer performed and more than half derived from Crawford's own transcriptions. Through this work, Crawford hopes to restore the cultural memory lost to time while tracing the long arc and historical significance of the St. Helena spirituals.

Harry Burleigh's music falls into three categories: secular, religious, and sacred. This 200-page collection is a treasure of history made usable in his fine arrangements. "Deep River" was published in 1917, the first of many to make Burleigh well-known as a composer. This title is available in SmartMusic.

Spirituals performed by jubilee troupes became a sensation in post-Civil War America. First brought to the stage by choral ensembles like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, spirituals anchored a wide range of late nineteenth-century entertainments, including minstrelsy, variety, and plays by both black and white companies. In the first book-length treatment of postbellum spirituals in theatrical entertainments, Sandra Jean Graham mines a trove of resources to chart the spiritual's journey from the private lives of slaves to the concert stage. Graham navigates the conflicting agendas of those who, in adapting spirituals for their own ends, sold conceptions of racial identity to their patrons. In so doing they lay the foundation for a black entertainment industry whose artistic, financial, and cultural practices extended into the twentieth century. A companion website contains jubilee troupe personnel, recordings, and profiles of 85 jubilee groups. Please go to: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/graham/spirituals/

A wonderful variety of 11 favorite spirituals are featured in this new songbook. Included are: Gospel Train * Ride the Chariot * Kum Ba Yah * Down by the Riverside * Wade in the Water * Yes, My Lord! * Amazing Grace * Go, Tell It on the Mountain * Joshua * Good News! * Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.

African American spirituals comprise one of the world's greatest and best-loved bodies of music. The Oxford Book of Spirituals is the first anthology to present a comprehensive survey of the genre's repertoire -- its principal composers, themes, and forms -- in a way that is at once stylistically authentic, historically meaningful, and intended for practical use both in worship and in concert. This collection features a rich array of songs, both familiar and less familiar, arranged for SATB choir by twenty-eight of the most significant American composers and presented in chronological order from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.

Authoritative study traces the African influences and lyric significance of such songs as Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and John Henry, and gives words and music for 230 songs. Bibliography. Index of Song Titles.