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Book Review| April 01 2020 Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, by Sandra Jean Graham Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, by Sandra Jean Graham. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. xvi, 330 pp. Mark Burford Mark Burford MARK BURFORD is Associate Professor of Music at Reed College. His scholarship focuses on twentieth-century popular music in the United States, particularly African American music, and nineteenth-century Austro-German concert music. His article “Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist—A Reinvention in Three Songs” received the Society for American Music's 2012 Irving Lowens Award. He is the author of Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field (Oxford University Press, 2019) and editor of The Mahalia Jackson Reader (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020) 73 (1): 187–192. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.1.187 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Burford; Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, by Sandra Jean Graham. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2020; 73 (1): 187–192. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2020.73.1.187 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search The opening chapters of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) attribute uncanny documentary power to spirituals. “I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do,” wrote Douglass, who substantiated these horrors through his gruesome description of the sadistic torture of his Aunt Hester by their master. “It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.” But where the written word proved inarticulate, slave songs bore stirring witness. “If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery,” Douglass advised listeners, “let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it... You do not currently have access to this content.
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