After Reconstruction, however, there was a serious mood of loss and malaise in the Black community, as Black advancement was steadily halted by white power, the emergence of Jim Crow laws and a dramatic reversal in the hopeful expectations that had accompanied Emancipation. As migration to the North escalated in the years just prior to World War I, combined with growing Black political movements, the conditions were ripe for the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1917-1935), during which a number of artists and community leaders pushed actively for a new agenda of Black pride. During this period, the spirituals flourished.

In addition to the use of spirituals as material for poetry and other literature, the spirituals also became part of the repertoire of such renowned concert artists as Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson. This development was sparked in part by concert arrangements of spirituals written by a number of young African American composers trained in the European classical tradition. Blending their intimate knowledge of slave songs and melodies with their classical training, these young composers also began a movement to utilize the spirituals (as well as ragtime, blues and other Black folk music) as a basis for symphonies, operas, oratorios and other extended music forms.

There were also the beginnings of a robust choral tradition, with choral arrangements of spirituals now being performed extensively by Black college choirs as well as chancel choirs in many mainline Black Protestant churches.

The immersion of early twentieth century African American composers like Harry Burleigh into the world of European classical music composition not only inspired their own new arrangements of spirituals, but also exerted an influence on the work of the European and American mentors with whom they studied. For example, Burleigh’s respectful teacher Antonin Dvorak spent a great deal of time listening to Burleigh sing spirituals, and discussed with Burleigh the possibility of using some of these slave melodies in new compositions. Subsequently, the influence of the spirituals was revealed strongly in Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” as well as much of his other music. The influence of the spirituals was also reflected strongly in the work of any number of European composers, such as Frederick Delius, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Michael Tippett. Later, the spirituals also served as inspiration for the works of Jewish composers driven out of Europe by the Nazis. The spirituals’ messages of hope, healing and spiritual fortitude in the face of oppression seemed ready made for this purpose.

During the Harlem Renaissance, there were also some tensions brewing. For one, there was an enormous debate over what poet Langston Hughes called “the Negro Vogue” – a white search for the natural, the exotic, the free – a celebration of black culture by whites flocking to the nightclubs of Harlem, singing the praises of the “primitive” that many African American leaders of the old guard – such as Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson -- found ultimately offensive. There were also signs of trouble in some of the mainline Black churches of the North, beginning in Chicago but rapidly spreading to other cities and regions of the country. As Chicago church music director-composers such as Edward Boatner sought to “elevate” the spirituals in the new art song genre of spirituals arrangements, some church members seemed hungry for more expressive and spontaneous music that was closer in spirit to their religious and cultural roots in the rural South.

It was in this environment that Thomas Dorsey and other church musicians fused musical elements of the blues and the spirituals to create a new church music that came to be known as “gospel.” At first quite controversial (viewed by some as “devil’s music”) it was not long before gospel music became a defining element of worship in Black churches. At first, gospel singers and choir directors drew freely on gospel songs, spirituals and hymns in sculpting the repertoire of the new, evolving Black church music. Over the next several decades, however, some of the old ambivalences concerning the spirituals re-surfaced, and the spirituals came to be heard less and less.