Spirituals Quotes

#1. How many of the original songs survive intact from the slave cabins? Probably not many in their original form. Time has transformed them like light in a prism. What we hope to present is a version of those spirituals, and they speak not just to black Americans, but to people worldwide.

Kathleen Battle

#2. I used to listen to country and western and blues, John Lee Hooker, spirituals, the Bluegrass Boys, and Eddie Arnold. There was a radio station that come on everyday with country, spirituals, and the blues.

Otis Rush

#3. In spirituals, the talk of heaven and deliverance was code for a better life. 'Crossing the River Jordan' was code, of course, for escaping to freedom.

Kathleen Battle

#4. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Alan Lomax

#5. As the African American theologian James Cone notes, "Far from being songs of passive resignation, the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation.

James Martin

#6. I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.

Isaac Hayes

#7. Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.

Maya Angelou

#8. There may come other days, when the many will crowd the narrow way; but, at this time, to be popular one must be broad - broad in doctrine, in morals, and in spirituals. But those on the strait road shall go straight to glory, and those on the broad road are all abroad.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

#9. While Johns (Martin Luther King's predecessor as pastor in Montgomery) agreed with Dexter's general disdain for emotionalism, he was very fond of traditional spirituals, believing they represented a part of their history they ought to embrace and celebrate.

Troy Jackson

#10. When I do concerts and recitals, the two most common requests are spirituals and opera.

Kathleen Battle

#11. Do you know most of the Jewish songs have the same trend of sadness as Negro spirituals?

Mahalia Jackson

#12. We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.

Wynton Marsalis

#13. your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#14. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Maya Angelou

#15. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

Wynton Marsalis

#16. I'm an old fan of the Negro spirituals.

Norman Finkelstein

#17. You have to have a little soul in your singing. The kind of soul that's in the spirituals. That's why I'd like to include spiritual material in the sets I do. It's a part of my life.

Sarah Vaughan

#18. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Ernest Gaines

#19. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#20. [W]e have always resented the natural inclination of most white people to demand spirituals the moment it is known that a Negro is about to sing. So often the request has seemed to savor of the feeling that we could do this and this alone.

Countee Cullen

#21. One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up.

Kesha Rogers

#22. By sowing frugality we reap liberty, a golden harvest.

Agesilaus II

#23. Max, if you survive your final test, can you steal me one of those magic outfits for me?
I'll try to get one for each of us. Hey! 'If'?

James Patterson

#24. My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming - sometimes even frightening - landscape, and invites you to get lost in it.

John Luther Adams

#25. Jake the trapeze artist was a man who stared death in the face, while most nights I stared television in the face.

David Nicholls

#26. Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.

Thomas Huxley