Feel the Spirit

Here are the results of two Harvard University seminars on 19th century African-American music, led by Eileen Southern in 1982 and 1986. This volume consists of 11 major contributions by faculty members of smaller American colleges and universities. Much of this information does not appear in any previously published secondary literature. Each chapter is immediately comprehensible by anyone interested in the subject, even without the terse perspective offered in the introduction. . . . A major contribution to the field. ChoiceThe discovery of Black music by Northern whites during the Civil War opened the way for many Black musicians and singers to pursue successful careers as composers and concert and stage artists. This collection of essays and bibliographical materials is an important contribution to our knowledge of their achievements and experiences in the post-Civil War period. Reflecting the combined efforts of leading specialists in the field, it documents and describes the careers of individual artists and performing groups and provides a vivid picture of what it was like to be Black and a musician in late nineteenth-century America.The introduction provides a background for the post-Civil War Developments and shows how the papers included in the anthology are related to the overall topic and to each other. The collection begins with a discussion of the music of Black Americans during the war years, both in military bands and individual performance. Several essays present biographical and bibliographical information on well-known concert performers and other musicians of the postwar period, including Nellie Brown Mitchell, Marie Selika Williams, P. G. Lowery, Sam Lucas, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Musical genres such as revival hymns and plantation melodies are considered together with the nineteenth-century musical and literary sources of modern Gospel. An essay on musical promotion offers some insights on concert management as it affected Black performers in New York and Boston. Another essay on keyboard music includes a bibliography of existing compositions by Black composers. The volume concludes with a bibliography of research sources and a general index particularly useful as a reference and guide for students with an interest in nineteenth-century Afro-American music.