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African Americans --- Blues (Music) --- Music --- Spirituals (Songs) --- Noirs américains --- Blues --- Musique --- Negro spirituals --- Religion --- History and criticism --- Histoire et critique --- Noirs américains

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Identifying the roots of African American spirituals and other religious folk music has intrigued academics, hymnologists and song leaders since this genre came to the public eye in 1867. The conversation on origins has waned and waxed for over eighty years, sometimes polemical, sometimes compromising. They Bear Acquaintance looks at this discussion through the output of various well-regarded researchers from the twentieth century. The effects of cultural distinctions, immigration patterns and class structure have all left their imprint on the anatomy of the music. No one living has ever heard a spiritual performed in an authentic setting, so misconceptions abound. Pre-dating the American Civil War and achieving global attention in the Civil Rights movement, the spirituals soften the edges of difficult situations, and speak gently, yet poignantly, to human struggles. The book also pinpoints new material from a wide range of sources in the twenty-first century that will preserve and affirm this music for many years to come

Choral music --- Spirituals (Songs) --- African Americans --- Camp meetings --- Negro spirituals --- Noirs américains --- History and criticism. --- Music --- Histoire et critique --- Musique

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Spirituals (Songs) --- African Americans --- Negro spirituals --- Noirs américains --- Texts --- History and criticism --- Songs and music --- Texts. --- Textes --- Histoire et critique --- Chants et musique

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Spirituals (Songs) --- Slaves --- Negro spirituals --- Esclaves --- History and criticism --- Social conditions --- Religious life --- Histoire et critique --- Conditions sociales --- Vie religieuse --- Spirituals (Songs) - History and criticism --- African Americans - Music - History and criticism --- Enslaved persons --- Religious life. --- Social conditions. --- African Americans

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In Culture on the Margins, Jon Cruz recounts the "discovery" of black music by white elites in the nineteenth century, boldly revealing how the episode shaped modern approaches to studying racial and ethnic cultures. Slave owners had long heard black song making as meaningless "noise." Abolitionists began to attribute social and political meaning to the music, inspired, as many were, by Frederick Douglass's invitation to hear slaves' songs as testimonies to their inner, subjective worlds. This interpretive shift--which Cruz calls "ethnosympathy"--marks the beginning of a mainstream American interest in the country's cultural margins. In tracing the emergence of a new interpretive framework for black music, Cruz shows how the concept of "cultural authenticity" is constantly redefined by critics for a variety of purposes--from easing anxieties arising from contested social relations to furthering debates about modern ethics and egalitarianism. In focusing on the spiritual aspect of black music, abolitionists, for example, pivoted toward an idealized religious singing subject at the expense of absorbing the more socially and politically elaborate issues presented in the slave narratives and other black writings. By the end of the century, Cruz maintains, modern social science also annexed much of this cultural turn. The result was a fully modern tension-ridden interest in culture on the racial margins of American society that has long had the effect of divorcing black culture from politics.

Culture --- African Americans --- Spirituals (Songs) --- Cultural sociology --- Sociology of culture --- Civilization --- Popular culture --- Afro-Americans --- Black Americans --- Colored people (United States) --- Negroes --- Africans --- Ethnology --- Blacks --- African American spirituals --- Afro-American spirituals --- Negro spirituals --- Folk songs, English --- Hymns, English --- Research --- History. --- Music --- Social aspects. --- Social aspects --- Black people