Martin Kersten

How important were spirituals & folk songs for the life of enslaved African Americans in the antebellum South? Martin Kersten

Essay from the year 2010 in the subject History - America, grade: 1,3, York University, language: English, abstract: Every study of the culture of black people in America inevitably reveals statements about the relationship between black and white Americans. In this essay this will not be a side effect but intended. On the following pages I want to put up the question whether spirituals - songs of black Christian Afro-Americans - can be simply seen as sorrow songs (as stated above) that only had one aim: to create a platform for black people to express their feelings, fears and their pain; or whether those songs can be interpreted as a motor for the black mass to draw the attention on the deficiency of a whole community, and eventually to achieve cultural, social and political changes. The subject of my investigation, then, is the social function of black music in America before the Civil War.