Slave spirituals resisted written notation because each performance was a fresh creation.

Evidence

The singing was done together, in groups, and, according to the anthropologist and Negro folk laureate Zora Neale Hurston, never the same way twice. “Each singing of the piece is a new creation,” she wrote. The action in these songs resisted the simple jotting down of musical notation. Nonetheless, after the Civil War and toward the end of the 1800s, attempts were made to reproduce them on paper and have them published. Interpolations of captive people’s music commenced at least as soon as 1867 with the publication of Slave Songs of the United States, a collection of 136 songs transcribed and assembled by the white abolitionists Lucy McKim Garrison, Charles Pickard Ware, and William Francis Allen, who didn’t always know what they were getting down. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1096

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how oral/improvisational cultures resist transcription — analogous to Deep Listening’s soundscape ideas and improvisation.
• SEED: Angle: the 1867 Slave Songs of the United States as a case study in the lossiness of all transcription — what gets erased when oral art becomes print.