"Spirituals"
In the 19th century black slaves composed religious songs called Spirituals. They sang while they worked in the cotton fields. They needed the rhythm of the songs to help them with their backbreaking work when they picked cotton or when they collected tobacco or sugar. The songs also expressed their pains and sorrows, and their desire for freedom. Congo Square in New Orleans is the exact birthplace of jazz because it was the only place where slaves were allowed to gather every Sunday, to sing, dance and play their music.
After the Civil War, as freed African Americans moved north and west to work in the industrial and railway industries, the agricultural songs of the slave era developed to suit these situations. In the 20th century, Spirituals songs gave birth to the Gospel and the Blues. "To have the blues" means to feel sad, melancholic and desperate. African American musical traditions influenced musical styles such as Rock'n'roll, R&B (Rhythm and Blues), soul, funk, and disco. During the 1980s and 1990s, the emergence of hip-hop and rap took African American musical traditions in new directions and created a distinctive art form as grounded in social protest as the early spirituals.
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