This is the first in a series of blogs to provide historical context for Chicago a cappella's upcoming February performances of spirituals, Roll, Jordan, Roll.  Some of this material didn't make it into the program notes and so is unique to this blog and this website.  Enjoy, and don't be shy about commenting if you have something to say.

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When I think of singing spirituals, it is almost always with the sense of being in a group.  While spirituals are sung mostly in the first person, they are generally sung collectively.  Singers of spirituals form a community of people, all singing of a common feeling (such as “I want to go to heaven when I die” or “I’ve been ‘buked”).  There are exceptions where the narrative voice is plural, such as “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder” or “We shall walk through the valley” or “We shall overcome.”  Yet more often than not, the spiritual speaks in a personal, individual voice, proclaimed in a song form that requires many.  Even when hearing solo recordings of the greats Paul Robeson or Marian Anderson singing spirituals, I always have a sense that they are singing for us all.  Perhaps it is the historical connection between the spiritual and the struggle for social justice and racial equality that has us (or at least me) have these associations. 

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I wish to share with you a quality of the African-American spiritual that we seem to intuitively feel but find it hard to describe or discuss.  I hope that I can write about this feeling adequately. 
 
It seems to me that, for many of us, the spiritual has at its essence the quality of a gift.  There is a sense that we have been given the spiritual through grace—through no merit of our own, simply by something outside of ourselves.  A gift is not meant to be hoarded;  it is meant to be shared, to be passed on to others.  It did not come from us and does not accrue to our credit, and we must give it away if it is to have lasting value and power.  The spiritual is part of our cultural heritage, and it powerfully enriches our lives—but none of us owns it.  
 
(I realize that my African-American brothers and sisters may have a different experience and may feel differently.  In any event, I would hope that something of the sense of the spirituals being a gift from prior generations has something of the ring of truth, and I would appreciate any feedback or clarification on the topic.)
 
How should we treat such a treasure?  In his remarkable book The Gift, author Lewis Hyde writes of the unusual quality that a work of art can have in our lives—that of a gift. Hyde provides examples from various cultures and folktales to show how the quality of gifts differs qualitatively from commodities. Gifts are used, and may even be consumed, but not in the ways that regular goods are.  His idea about gifts resonates with my sense of how the spiritual lives among us here in the USA and around the world. 
 
There is a quality of reciprocity inherent in a gift.  This quality is a demand that is sometimes communicated implicitly or intuitively, but communicated nonetheless.  The gift acts as a sort of social glue to bind us together.  Hyde writes of an unusual gift tradition in the Trobriand Islands of the South Pacific, called the Kula ritual.  In the Kula, women send gifts of red shell necklaces to other women.  This seems simple enough, but it turns out that the necklaces move clockwise around the islands, transported by canoe.  (The men give one another armbands, which travel in a counterclockwise direction around the archipelago.)  The gifts can take from two to ten years to complete the circuit. 
 
Hyde writes:
Now that we have seen the figure of the circle we can understand what seems at first to be a paradox of gift exchange:  when the gift is used, it is not used up.  Quite the opposite, in fact:  the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant.
 
The spiritual shares this quality of a gift:  it did not come from us.  The gift requires special care.  (The book The Gift was itself a gift from our composer friend Paul Crabtree.) It therefore feels imperative to keep giving it away.  That is why we sing them.

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Thanks for reading this first installment.  There will be more to come as we ramp up to the concerts.  Don't forget to comment!