Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 1: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

Freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman found inspiration in the heroic stories of Moses, Daniel, and Jesus as they inspired an enslaved people to act.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers were initially reluctant to turn to spirituals, but their popularity soared in the United States and Europe once they did. Their success spawned an entire genre of sacred part-singing and numerous similar groups.

Paul Robeson was one of many artists to have recorded “John Brown’s Body.” The song influenced many to convert to the antislavery cause. The Fisk Jubilee Singers helped perpetuate the song’s popularity after the Civil War.

Today, Blind Willie Johnson is the best-known songster, but he has a recorded legacy of only 30 songs. Despite the scarcity of his recordings and the fact that virtually nothing is known about him, his singing and slide-guitar playing are deeply influential on modern musicians.

Many of the songs that Lawrence Gellert encountered on the road and wrote about for New Masses were collected and published in Negro Songs of Protest (1936).

The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In July 1933, The Crisis reported that the Glee Club of Hampton Institute entertained guests at the White House, including the former premier of France. Also that summer, the Morehouse College Glee Club performed spirituals for the President.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is well known to even casual readers of American history. Martin Luther King, Sr., said his son had a “fine, clear voice” and a passionate love for Baptist music.