Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry

Abstract

Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry is the first book to trace the musical evolution of postwar spirituals. The jubilee singers who introduced them ignited a chain reaction that rippled throughout multiple levels of popular culture for the rest of the century, influencing blackface minstrelsy, stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other plays, and variety shows. The widespread influence of spirituals on popular amusements illustrates the symbolic distance these songs had traveled since the Civil War, when they had functioned as private, sacred folk music. The groups and individuals – both white and black – that appropriated spirituals in popular entertainments had wide-ranging and often conflicting agendas, from the preservationist to the educational to the commercially exploitative. This book examines how those agendas affected the musical style of spirituals and shaped black entertainment philosophies and and business practices.

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