Semester Research Report

Marisol Lopez

B4 English III H

January 26, 2015

Semester Research Report

Freedom Through Music When the word slavery first goes through our mind we imagine the blood in their back, the hard work in their hands, and the way they were shipped to America. Now, imagine asking any African slave from the South what it must have been like to be a slave. They would say that it was the worst thing any human being in the world could go through. Slavery was the reason why so many African slaves always had thoughts of escaping. Slaves used music as a way to communicate with one another and find their way to freedom. They used religious music as a tool to send secret messages for those who were escaping from slavery. And in the end, how spirituals

As slaves lived a despicable life in America, they found a way to use music as an escape from the world of slavery. They took the idea of using Christian hymns to creating their own type of music called spirituals (Haskins 28). Spirituals were religious songs that were sung by the slaves. They either came from Bible stories, from nature or from the personal experience of the slaves themselves (Blue 48). They sang spirituals to motivate and inspire themselves when they had no motivation to keep going in life (Henry 2). The spirituals also expressed the sufferings of the slaves and how they longed to be in heaven instead of earth (Haskins 28). Spirituals were the only thing that gave the slaves hope when they had barely any hope left. The spirituals that were sung by the slaves weren’t just any songs. They were also songs that gave the slaves their ticket to freedom to be able to run away from

How music gave the slaves hope and life when they felt like they preferred to be dead than alive. Spirituals allowed the slaves to communicate with one another in secret. It gave them the messages of where to go and what to do (Blue 48). And to this day, we have music that was influenced by the Africans spirituals like the blues. If it weren’t for the slaves, music would just be like a piece of stick, it would be meaningless. But today, because of them, we use music to describe everything that happens to us in life. We use it as a way to free ourselves from the world around us just like the slaves freed themselves from slavery. No one will ever understand the real pain the slaves went through under the rule of the white men, until someone actually experiences what they went through. Their music is the closest thing that we have that can help us understand what they went through. And one day, all of those African slaves that suffered on earth will be at peace in