During the era of slavery, those who labored in captivity pioneered a musical motif that began as “unaccompanied songs of sorrow and hope," said Everett McCorvey, founder, director and principal ...

Throughout February, WTOP is celebrating Black History Month. Join us on air and online as we bring you the stories, people and places that make up our diverse community. Jackson Caesar will be ...

Spirituals are rooted in a history of pain and hope. Today, Colorado Matters presents an encore episode: "Journey to Freedom" ...

The American Spiritual Ensemble is bringing the history and soul of American Negro spiritual music to Boston in their first tour of the Northeast. “I call it the 'mother music.' It's the music that ...

“It is America’s first music,” he said of the songs that enslaved people created when they mixed African rhythms with the ...

Presents Negro spirituals, sung in pure form as they were a century ago on St. Simon's Island off the coast of Georgia. Introduces each song with explanatory titles and then several women sing them ...

"It was the spiritual song – or Negro Spiritual – that gave hope to American slaves as they cried out to God, asking him to send a “Moses” to lead them out of their bondage as He did with the Hebrew ...

In the North Carolina sharecropper’s shanty where Glenn Settle grew up, his mother used to sing the old Negro spirituals to him. Between songs, she told him: “If white and colored folks just got to ...