Spirituals

My favorite type of song is a spiritual. I don't know
exactly why, maybe because they are both my favorite
kind of music AND carry a special meaning for me...but
I do know that I like them a lot. Some of the most
common are really pretty, have a story I recognize,
and are really fun to sing (after all, slaveowners
thought that because their slaves were singing, they
were HAPPY), and yet they have this underlying message
of freedom...which is really cool. And a lot of times,
freedom was coded as "heaven" which adds to the
meaning of the song if you don't dig deeper into its
origins.

A lot of times, even if a spiritual has no particular
story it tells (e.g., it's not like "Go Down Moses" or
"Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho") I can figure out
what story it's about, if it's about one ("Then I'm
Goin' Home" for example...). And some of them are
about no particular story, but I find the concept so
beautiful ("Bright Morning Stars").

And my favorite is "Bright Morning Stars". If you hear
me singing it, you can't tell whether I'm happy, sad,
worried, angry, in a singing mood, or what. If you
hear me singing it, then singing a bunch of Christmas,
Easter, and other songs (spirituals or not), you know
I'm really worried and nervous. It truly calms me down
to sing, but what calms me down the most is to sing
spirituals, as well as a few Christmas and Easter
songs thrown in.

Anyway, I figured this all out in the car singing "Go
Down Moses" nice and quietly. As I recently told
someone in an email: "nobody minds me singing in the
car", so that's a big boredom buster AND
stress-reliever. Too bad it doesn't really lend itself
to Int'l airports and big honkin' jets...
Saro