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XXIV |
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WHITE SPIRITUALS
"I am bound for the Promised Land."
"Spontaneous song became a marked characteristic of the camp meetings. Rough and irregular couplets or stanzas were concocted out of Scripture phrases and everyday speech, with liberal interspersing of hallelujahs and refrains. Such ejaculatory hymns were frequently started by an excited auditor during the preaching, and taken up by the throng until the meeting dissolved into a 'singing-ecstasy' culminating in a general handshaking. Sometimes they were given forth by a preacher, who had a sense of rhythm, under the excitement of his preaching and the agitation of his audience. . . . Many of these rude songs perished in the using, some were written down, passing from hand to hand. The camp-meeting song books which began to appear in the first decade of the nineteenth century doubtless contain such of these as proved effective and popular." *
•From White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands, by George Pullen Jackson, who quotes from The English Hymn, by Louis F. Benson. |
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