The history of Black poetry in New Orleans is so vast and complex that no one has yet undertaken a comprehensive study of its history. Such a history would sort out its origins in the Spirituals sung by those trafficked in and out of the city’s antebellum commerce in the enslaved and in the very different Afro-Creole poetry of the 1840s and 1860s; would grapple with the ways the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance shaped careers in poetry associated with the city, pulling some away and but also inspiring others to cultivate a keen pride in the deep cultural roots of Black America in the city; it would explore the meaning of the Black Arts Movement here as well as the central theme of memory-work in the generations that followed, especially as post-Katrina gentrification continues to change the city’s complexion.

This chapter establishes the spirituals as the bedrock of African American poetry to characterize the tradition as inherently innovative from its origins to the present. It challenges the standard claim that African American poetry begins with texts written by enslaved persons reflecting familiarity with canonical British poetry. In this approach, criticism has generally considered African American poetry in dialogue with the mainstream canon, whether emulating or criticizing its values. Privileging written texts in conventional forms has resulted in devaluing poetry reflecting characteristics such as orality, performance, anonymity, and communal collaboration. It also results in wide acceptance of an African American poetry canon that historically has overlooked the innovative nature of this genre from its origins and an ensuing tradition of avant-garde poetry. From this biased perspective, the spirituals have been overlooked as the genesis of African American poetry, even though that is their rightful place. Viewing the spirituals as the true foundation of this tradition implies shifting some assumptions not just about these poems, but about the place and meaning of originality.

In 2003, the late Rae Linda Brown wrote a paper called “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’: Harry T. Burleigh’s Influence on Florence B. Price.” The paper was intended for a national conference called “The Heritage and Legacy of Harry T. Burleigh.” Brown’s plans to deliver the paper did not materialize, but with the permission of Brown’s sister, Carlene J. Brown, and the University of Illinois Press, Brown’s paper forms the basis of this chapter. Burleigh’s influence on Price’s art songs was profound and their correspondence reveals a mentorship model in which Burleigh’s authority (especially in his approaches to text, harmony, and vernacular idioms) was unquestionable. Price’s connection to Burleigh illuminates his position as a central figure in the wider community of early twentieth-century Black classical composers in the United States. This chapter brings greater context to the creative milieu in which Price worked.

Folk music is irrevocably bound up with histories of racial thinking, from Atlantic slavery and the Middle Passage to W. E. B. Du Bois and beyond. In North America, Black folk music emerged as a vital expression of identity, resilience, and community amidst centuries of oppression. The most popular Black music sounds from spirituals and blues to rap music served as artistic outlets to retain African cultural continuances and navigate and resist racial discrimination, while also confronting colonial histories and the complexities of diasporic experience. This chapter illuminates how folk music reflects and shapes racial dynamics, offering insights into the broader cultural conversations surrounding race, identity, and resistance in North America and Britain. Further, it underscores the importance of understanding these musical traditions not just as artifacts of the past but as living expressions of ongoing struggles and resilience within Black communities.

In this chapter Angeline Morrison offers an exquisitely written account of what mythopoeic singing means to her and why it is central to reimagining the history of British folk music. Drawing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, she highlights the transformative power of song. Disembodied, imaginal, or non-physical things, she argues, can be sung into being. This process can serve the cause of decolonization by engaging in a form of contemporary mythmaking that re-enchants and re-populates historical landscapes with figures known to have been present, but who may not be identifiable in the body of song that survives.

Between 1886 and 1889, the renowned mixed vocal ensemble, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, of Tennessee, USA, toured Australia and New Zealand. The Singers’ concerts featured polished arrangements of spirituals, a unique African American form of religious folk song. These performances sparked a conversation about the boundaries of race and the transformative potential of the spiritual for those who embraced the genre within the Australian context. Over the century that followed, often but not always with the support of white missionaries, Indigenous groups employed the songs in various ways: as anthems of emancipation; to stir sympathy among white audiences; as a means of securing space on Australian concert stages and over the air, and to call out the Australian government’s racist policies. Hence, the Fisk Singers’ tour of Australia set into play both performance practices and discourses about the power of Westernising non-European music that fit easily within Australian assimilationist social ideology. Yet tensions would noticeably arise around the mid twentieth century between those who championed spiritual singing as a pathway to assimilation and touring African American recitalists such as Paul Robeson who viewed the cultural value of the songs in starkly different terms.

Margaret Bonds conceived The Montgomery Variations during a thirteen-state Southern tour in the spring of 1963 – a tour that took her not only to Montgomery, Alabama (a fiercely contested battleground in the ongoing Civil Rights Movement), but also to Birmingham in the same state – the latter at the beginning of Dr. Martin Luther King’s difficult Birmingham campaign. Of her experiences there was born a programmatic composition that used the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” as the basis of a symphonic variation set that drew on models including J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Death and Transfiguration to trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement from the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) through the Sixteenth-Street Baptist Church bombing (Birmingham, 1963), with a radiant “Benediction” evidently born in the wake of the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. This chapter situates The Montgomery Variations in the personal, professional, and societal developments traced in Chapter 1 and analyzes the music and program to explore how Bonds used it to advance her activist agenda.

The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

This chapter details Alain Locke’s contributions to value theory and their relationship to the overall cultural project of the Harlem Renaissance. It argues that Locke viewed the New Negro Renaissance and the transvaluation of black art – that is, the re-estimation of its value according to new principles of judgment – as one moment in a deeper and ongoing axiological transformation. To do so, it looks at his writings on African American spirituals and his “cultural retrospectives” of the 1930s and 1940s (annual reviews that took stock of the year’s work in black themes) as exemplary instances of such transvaluation. In these writings, Locke continually revised the significance and boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance.