An Analysis of the Message of the Negro Spirituals…
…Within the Context of Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Hope
by Carolyn Matthews, Dominican University.
From the website: Sweet Chariot (click on image)
Presented at the 2010 Graduate Liberal Studies Symposium, Reed College, Portland Oregon, 26 June
Editor’s Note: this essay contains the lyrics to several spirituals, and a downloadable (.wav) recording of Ms. Matthews singing the spiritual.
The music had its origin on shores distant from the land where its people eventually came to dwell for generations. They were stripped physically and metaphorically of their native trappings. Those who survived what came to be called the “Middle Passage,” would have to build community among people from disparate tribes. Although the languages were different and the religious customs varied, it was the music and the inherent sense of community that would be reinforced and would help to keep the hope of freedom forever alive.
Work songs, sorrow songs, laments, moans and chants; the musical genre that has come to be known as the Negro Spiritual emanated from the folk song of the enslaved African. Once thought to be simple expressions of Christian faith from an illiterate people, objective scholarship over the years has come to understand the Spiritual as more than that. Although composed and formed on the shores of the New World, the music has definite African roots. Wyatt Tee Walker writes, “Wherever the Africans and their progeny touched New World shores, no matter what the condition of their existence, they maintained their musical identity. The rhythm forms and musical idioms were kept alive through the desperate need of the Africans for humanness, which the slave system forcibly stripped from them” (Walker 48, 29). The American slave system was brutal, oppressive and dehumanizing. Although many freedoms were lost the enslaved African retained the freedom to think and thereby was able to develop a longing for freedom and liberation from bondage, providing the foundation from which they would hope for and look forward to a better day. This message, as communicated in selected Spirituals, is analyzed in the context of Jürgen Moltmann’s concept of hope. Read the rest of this entry »
