![gospel song born to die lyrics meaning gospel song born to die lyrics meaning](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/03/14/magazine/14mag-music-photos-06/14mag-music-photos-06-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg)
Spirituals are recognized as some of the world's most authentic spiritual utterances since David penned the Psalms. Little wonder, then, that of all the slave songs, it is the Spirituals, expressing the deepest religious emotions of souls touched by Christ, which kindles a flame in our hearts. They sang while picking cotton or shucking corn, sang on the chain gang, sang in prison, sang in church-when allowed to attend. Sold into hard work, poverty and oppression in America, they turned to songs for solace, singing on every possible occasion in rhythms that had been long familiar to their race. The blacks who stepped in chains from the slave ships were a musical people, used to expressing religious ideas in song. What is more, they were expressed with rhythms of utmost sophistication and melodies plaintive, haunting, or oddly original. Simple the words may have been, but they expressed spiritual aspirations and sorrows as deep as any found in Christendom. With bodies swaying and eyes half-closed, they sang, lifting to heaven their anguish and triumph. But they had to sing, had to sing without restraint, had to pour out to God their souls' deepest prayers, longings and complaints, regardless of consequences. Singly or by twos the black slaves slipped into the torch-lit forest grove. "As we wheeled up the avenue, our numbers ever increasing, the Negroes broke into another song, more joyful than the last, and all clapped hands in unison, when they sang the chorus until the air quivered with melody." (From an account by Mary Livermore, a Boston school teacher in Virginia before the Civil War.) Slave Song Spirituals