Slave Songs of the United States was a collection of African American music

African American music

African-American music is an umbrella term given to a range of musics and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large and significant ethnic minority of the population of the United States...

 published in 1867. It was the first, and most influential, collection of spiritual

Spiritual (music)

Spirituals are religious songs which were created by enslaved African people in America.-Terminology and origin:...

s to be published; the collectors were Northern abolitionists, William Francis Allen

William Francis Allen

William Francis Allen was an American classical scholar and an editor of the first book of American slave songs....

, Lucy McKim Garrison

Lucy McKim Garrison

Lucy McKim Garrison was an American song collector, contributor to Slave Songs of the United States. Her work in Port Royal, South Carolina constitutes the first attempt systematically describe the characteristics of African American spirituals.-Notes:...

 and Charles Pickard Ware

Charles Pickard Ware

Charles Pickard Ware , was an American educator and music transcriber. An abolitionist, he served as a civilian administrator in the Union Army, where he was a supervisor of freedmen on plantations at Port Royal, South Carolina during the Civil War...

. It is a "milestone not just in African American music but in modern folk history". It is also the first published collection of African-American music of any kind.

External links

• Full text on GoogleBooks
• Remastered digital edition using LilyPond