An Index to Spirituals (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798855807233)

Indexes the printed music of spirituals with publications dating from 1867 to the present.

African American spirituals constitute one of the largest bodies of American folk song and have survived into the twenty-first century. They are the root of American music. This book indexes some sixty-six hundred spirituals in 233 music anthologies published from 1867 to the present. Abromeit began indexing spirituals in the late nineties and was the first to update access to this body of repertoire in more than half a century. This noteworthy work serves as an essential research tool for performers, scholars, and students of African American music and history. The spirituals are neatly organized in five indexes: Uniform Title, Dialect Title, First Line, Song Classification that includes twenty significant categories, and Scriptural References. A bibliography of indexed sources serves as a guide for further research.