The foundational influence of spirituals in African-American culture: a psychological perspective.

There is a voluminous body of published scholarship on the history and cultural influence of the African-American spirituals tradition, beginning a century ago with a series of essays by W.E.B. Du Bois (1989) in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). However, there has been relatively little focus on spirituals from a comprehensively psychological and cultural perspective. That is, the issue of how the spirituals have functioned psychologically in the culture, both during North American slavery and in the time since the end of official slavery in 1865, has received some attention in several different realms but usually in piecemeal fashion. For example, John Lovell Jr.'s (1972) ...