The Rise of Secular Song

Abstract

Abstract If during slavery it was the secular songs that were occasional and the religious songs that represented the ethos of the black folk, in freedom the situation began to reverse itself. Secular song became increasingly important in black folk culture in the decades following freedom. Negroes were thrust into the larger world, and their response to their experience was couched more and more in explicitly worldly terms. The sacred world was not shattered immediately and decisively for all Negroes in the period after the Civil War; it continued, with different degrees of intensity and pervasiveness, to inform the consciousness and world view of large numbers of blacks both North and South. But never again was it to occupy the central position of the antebellum years. The aesthetics and forms of Afro-American slave folk culture remained fundamentally important throughout the years of freedom, but their content was reshaped by the experiences of the new existence and the new imperatives.