Spirituals and the Sorrow Songs

Wade in the Water. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. Were You There. The greatest body of religious music America has produced, born out of the slave South and central to W. E. B. Du Bois's claim that the spirituals are the singular spiritual heritage of the nation. Listen to the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson.