Robert Darden's book, Nothing but Love in God's Water, is a treasure trove of insights into black sacred music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. The slave spirituals mined the Bible and found so many oppressed heroes to sing about like Daniel and Joseph. Moses was a common person for them to sing about:
"To overcome an institution as heinous as perpetual slavery, enforced by the armed might of a powerful nation, calls for equally powerful, spiritually compelling heroes. The Moses narratives from the Old Testament provide such a hero. In the course of leading his people out of slavery into the Promised Land, the reluctant hero Moses endured many trials and hardship, ordeals that gave him the "spiritual knowledge and power" necessary to confront the Pharaoh and his vast armies. At the same time, the "empowerment of Moses" represented for African-Americans slaves the "rewards" of maintaining a relationship with God: "Inasmuch as converted Africans believed that "de God that lived in Moses' time jus' de same today," they also believed that He would answer their prayers and empower a deliverer hero from one among their number." (Darden, Nothing but Love in God's Water, 29)
And of course, slaves sang about Jesus too. An extremely limited list of songs from some of the earliest collections would include titles like: "Tell My Jesus 'Morning'"; "Jesus on the Waterside"; "Jesus Won't You Come By-and-By?"; "No Man Can Hinder Me"; "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had", songs which are all very Jesus-focused.
These songs were deeply Jesus-centered, and in lifting up the authority of Jesus, were very subversive to the temporal authority of the slave-master:
"John W. Work, who also directed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, recounts the story of a group of slaves on a plantation on the Red River in the early 1800s who crossed the river each Sunday to worship at a nearby mission in the Indian Territory. In time, the slave owner heard that the missionary was from the North and, fearing that the man put ideas of freedom in their heads, ended the practice. But the slaves began sneaking away at nights to attend the services, singing "Steal Away to Jesus" as their cue. When the missionary heard the soft singing, he would go to the river's edge to help the slaves ashore." (Darden, 39)
The song vividly illustrates the transfer of authority to Jesus in a way that carried a profound double meaning for slaves. The song conveyed both the sense of stealing away from the sway of the sinful world, and also a literal stealing away by night from their oppression so they may worship the Lord.
Many of these spirituals found their theme in the birth of Jesus:
"It is then not difficult to understand the slaves' attraction to the Nativity spirituals, where the helpless infant and the refugee parents in an occupied land find shelter in a cave or barn, surrounded by animals. The infant Jesus is tenderly, lovingly presented in these spirituals: "Sister Mary had-a but one child, Born in Bethlehem / And every time-a baby cried, She'd-a rocked Him in the weary land."
Even the birth narratives of Jesus had, for slaves, a quality that subverted the existing order. Darden continues:
"But there is sometimes a note of defiance even amid the most tender depiction of Jesus as a baby. The "sentimental image of a baby in a manger" in a spiritual like "Sweet Little Jesus Boy," Mitchell suggests, should not "be confused with a faith without teeth":
Sweet little Jesus boy, they made you be born in a manger.
Sweet little Jesus boy, they didn't know who you was.
They treat you mean, Lawd; treat me mean, too,
But that's how things is down here; they don't know who you is. (quoted in Darden, 41)
From the mere fact that Christ was ill-treated in this world, the song opens up on the hope for an entirely different realm than we find "down here" in this world. Songs like this carry the sense so powerfully that people in this world are not often recognized for who they are, and that their true worth and dignity often goes hidden, and that this was above all true of the incarnate Lord. Accompanying this is the sense that the judgment will bring with it a right ordering of everything. This is vividly captured in a song called "Had No Room," recorded by Mahalia Jackson and The Staple Singers among others. It begins in the inn:
Had no room
Had no room
Had no room at the inn
When the time had surely come
For the Savior to be born
Had no room at the inn
Had no room, had no room
But then it moves to a heavenly courthouse where the servants at the inn will give account as to how the innkeepers withheld compassion from Mary:
Well, there was a bellboy, and a porter, and a waitress, and a maid, and a cook
I know they'll be a witness.
In that great judgment day
When we'll all hear them say
How they turned poor Mary away
Had no room at the inn
Had no room, had no room
These songs are resources for us to remember that in Christ, God became poor and rejected. Similarly, the slave experience of Jesus' infancy reminds us that the existing power structures of the world are opposed to this baby King, and that if we want to stand with Jesus, we need to be prepared to be uncomfortable.
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