The origins, performance, and dissemination of the African-American spiritual: Personal papers, scores, and media in special collections of selected libraries in Chapel Hill, Durham, and Salisbury, North Carolina

The purpose of this study is to examine personal papers, scores, and media housed in Special Collection Depositories in Chapel Hill, Durham and Salisbury, North Carolina, in order to provide information concerning the origins, performance, and dissemination of the African-American Spiritual. Primary sources will include non-circulating materials with pertinent information. Although housed in North Carolina, the sources contain references to locations throughout the eastern United States. Personal papers include diaries; oral histories; studies; and transcripts of interviews, lectures and speeches. Scores of the music are in books from the late nineteenth century and African-American Spiritual collections published in the early twentieth century. The published scores contain commentary pertaining to the music and its performance. Media sources include concert playbills, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, and broadsides advertising performances of African-American Spiritual.; The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill maintains four depositories which house information on African-American Spirituals. They are Documenting the American South (DAS), a digitized library of Slave Narratives, First-Person Narratives, and Southern Literature to 1920 ; the Manuscripts Department; the North Carolina Collection; and the Rare Book Collection.; Durham libraries examined include the James E. Shephard Memorial Library at North Carolina Central University, the Manuscripts Department of Perkins Library at Duke University, and the Stanford L. Warren Public Library. In Salisbury, Livingstone College depositories include Heritage Hall and the Rare Book Collection of Lilly Library.; These depositories maintain much primary source material concerning the African-American Spiritual. The origins are discussed in terms of the function of the songs in the lives of slaves, the debate concerning the musical genesis of the African-American Spiritual, and the characteristic traits of the music. Performance is examined through personal accounts from the nineteenth century, the first publications attempting to notate African-American Spirituals, and recordings made during the twentieth century. Dissemination is traced through personal accounts of the touring African-American choirs who performed concert versions of the African-American Spirituals in the Northern U.S. and England. Other sources of dissemination detailed are theatrical and minstrel troupes who incorporated African-American Spirituals in their productions.