Negro Spirituals
Spirituals, a religious folk song of American origin, particularly associated with African-American Protestants of the southern United States. The African-American spiritual, characterized by syncopation, polyrhythmic structure, and the pentatonic scale of five whole tones, is, above all, a deeply emotional song. Spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius yet in America. However, the very elements that make them uniquely expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. Spirituals were…
