Spirituals and Gospel Songs: Messages of Unity, Hope, and Deliverance

Spirituals and gospel songs have a capacity to instill courage and bring people together. Spirituals helped enslaved Americans of the antebellum American South persevere through unimaginable hardships and look optimistically to a future of freedom. Similarly, gospel songs have inspired strength and Christian harmony for centuries. This essay briefly explores the roles spirituals and gospel songs played at the end of the American Civil War and in the post-war endeavors of The Fisk Jubilee Singers and Moody-Sankey revivalists. The essay also includes analysis of Albert Brumley's popular twentieth-century gospel song “I'll Fly Away,” its relationship to spirituals, and its positive reception by African American performers. There are two intended purposes: to indicate how spirituals and gospel songs provide creative insights into specific historical moments and to show how their verses transcend those moments to express broader messages of unity, hope, and deliverance.