Kathleen A. Abromeit, '85
An Index to African American Spirituals for the Solo Voice, by Kathleen A. Abromeit and Francois Clemmens. Hardcover, 224 pages; Greenwood Press, January 1999; ISBN: 0-3133-0577-3.
Kathleen Abromeit is conservatory public services librarian at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. She is an active member of the Music Library Association and has written numerous reviews and articles for scholarly journals.
This is the first index of African American spirituals to be published in more than 50 years and is expected to be an important research tool for scholars and students of African American history and music.
Historically, the first collection of slave songs appeared in 1843, without musical notation, in a series of three articles by a Methodist missionary identified only as "c." Collections that included musical notation began appearing in the 1850s, and the earliest book-length collection of spirituals containing both lyrics and music was published in 1867 as Slave Songs of the United States. Not since the 1930s, with the publication of the Index to Negro Spirituals by the Cleveland Public Library, has an index of spirituals been compiled.
The current volume is organized in four indexes -- by title, by first line, by alternative title, and by a topic index of 20 categories -- and also includes a bibliography of indexed sources.
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