Sources & Bibliography
Deep River draws on public domain primary sources and the work of scholars who have dedicated their careers to understanding this tradition. What follows is a guide to the most important of those resources.
Primary Sources
Du Bois, W.E.B. "The Sorrow Songs." The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
Available free online ↗Chapter XIV. The foundational scholarly treatment of the spirituals as art.
Marsh, J.B.T. The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880.
Available free online ↗Documents the Fisk Jubilee Singers' repertoire with musical notation.
Work, John Wesley. Folk Song of the American Negro. Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1915.
One of the earliest systematic academic studies of the spiritual tradition.
Fenner, Thomas P. Cabin and Plantation Songs. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1874.
Hampton collection documentation; particularly strong on Sea Islands traditions.
Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867.
Available free online ↗The first major published collection of spirituals. Collected during and just after the Civil War.
Key Scholars
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963)
Sociologist, historian, and civil rights leader. His chapter "The Sorrow Songs" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) established the critical framework for understanding spirituals as high art and as historical testimony.
Dena Epstein (1916–2013)
Music librarian and scholar. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977) is the most comprehensive historical account of African American folk music in the antebellum period.
John Lovell Jr. (1907–1974)
Scholar of African American literature. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) remains a definitive study of the spiritual tradition's theological and political dimensions.
John Wesley Work II (1873–1925)
Musician and scholar at Fisk University. His Folk Song of the American Negro (1915) was among the first academic treatments of the spirituals by a Black scholar.
James H. Cone (1938–2018)
Theologian and founder of Black liberation theology. The Spirituals and the Blues (1972) reads the spirituals as a theology of liberation, inseparable from the conditions of oppression that produced them.
Further Reading
- Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues. New York: Seabury Press, 1972.
- Epstein, Dena J. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
- Lovell, John Jr. Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
- Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
- Spencer, Jon Michael. Black Hymnody: A Hymnological History of the African-American Church. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.
- Thurman, Howard. Deep River and The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1975.