Go Down, Moses Summary

The most prominent agent and unified elements of slave spirituals, however, was the “call-and-response” format, as it argued for the opportunity for the emancipation of both the individual and the collective “group” of slaves. In “Go Down, Moses,” the first and third lines of each stanza would have been sung by a leader, and a group would respond in unison with the phrase “let my people go.” This addition is crucial to the format of an African spiritual and a convention that can be specifically ascribed to the African-American slave tradition. The profound messages, hidden through storytelling and single word cues, made spirituals more conversational and moment-oriented than songs that were expressed through conventional sheet music. This is

Roy claims that musical socialization between blacks and whites began with the influence of the minstrel culture, where slaveowners used slaves to entertain at dances during the Antebellum period. He claims that, although the image of the minstrel was a vehemently racist one, the spirituals that minstrels sang were comparable to the spirituals sung with their peers on slave plantations. Nevertheless, Roy claims that these songs were also sung with European influence due to the fact that the slaveowners who employed the minstrels to perform also had these minstrels learn musical instruments. In order to do this, these slaves had to learn European practice techniques and notation styles, such as the diatonic scale, in order to be considered “successful” as a minstrel. This undoubtedly had an influence on the nature of the minstrel figure, and this began the white American’s influence on the musical form of black spirituals (Roy 33). This, according to Roy, also formulated the genre of American folk music, which was collaborative and synergetic. While I do not necessarily rebuke this particular claim, Roy ignores the fact that this new genre was formulated years after slaves began to sing spirituals. This

This group, formed after the end of the Civil War, was made up of African-American students, some of whom were former slaves. They were educated scholars who studied music and history alike at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (Roy 38). They came from different backgrounds, but taught one another the spirituals that they knew the same way that slaves would have done through oral tradition and the transmission of songs by ear (Epstein 61). However, the performance of these songs was tirelessly rehearsed, mostly due to the undesirable response from white listeners who had heard “authentic” slave spirituals and belittled them to nothing more than “groans and screams” due to their improvised performances that were given little-to-no rehearsal time (Epstein 63). Furthermore, the Fisk Jubilee Singers were part of a newly-formed black middle class and performed mostly European classical music, with a few arranged slave songs in between. They instead chose to shun the original slave spirituals, calling them “undignified primitive reminders of servitude” (Roy 38). This rejection worked, as the group had unprecedented success with white listeners and was able to be commercialized. This allowed whites to have conversations with blacks about