THE STATE MUSIC
The Spiritual

ACT 64, (H.177), 1999 designated THE SPIRITUAL as the Official Music of the State.
The spiritual is a song originating in the slave era that deals primarily with a religious or sacred theme. Much of this music originated along the coastal regions of South Carolina. The spiritual was passed down orally for many years and first committed to writing in South Carolina on St. Helena Island by a freed black woman and a white Union Army officer during the Civil War. The publication of an 1867 book on slave songs was the result of the work done by an educational mission on the Port Royal islands in 1861.

The earliest known spirituals were taken from passages of the Bible. Some well-known examples of spirituals are "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot", "Steal Away to Jesus", "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen", "Roll, Jordan, Roll", "Wade in the Water" "Come by Here Lord, Come by Here", "This Little Light of Mine", "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child", "Go Down, Moses", "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", and "Follow the Drinking Gourd".

Booker T. Washington probably best described spirituals as "... the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor... having their origin chiefly in the camp meetings, the revivals and in other religious gatherings... the music of these songs goes to the heart because it comes from the heart...". Those South Carolinians who perform the "Gullah Shout" state that spirituals are key to getting the rhythm for the "Shout". In old spirituals style, a leader improvises the text, time, and melody and other singers respond by repeating short phrases, and this traditional West African singing style is referred to as leader-chorus or call-and-response.

The legacy of spirituals is still evident in African-American communities where the "talking back" or call and response heard among churchgoers comes directly from slave songs and spirituals. For many South Carolina citizens, the spirituals were the first songs they learned. Singing a spiritual is one way of honoring one's past and lineage. Although spirituals are not literature, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature signaled their importance by opening up the anthology with a chapter entitled "The Vernacular Tradition" and spirituals are the first discussed oral tradition of black expression.