When we talk about “folk music,” we often picture ballads from the Appalachian mountains or fiddlers at a barn dance. But another, deeply American tradition deserves equal recognition: the spiritual. Born from the experiences of enslaved African Americans, spirituals are some of the earliest and most distinctively American folk songs. They carry the weight of history, blending sorrow, hope, resistance, and faith into a sound that shaped the nation’s musical identity.

The word “spiritual”, when referring to praise music, may have been derived from the King James Bible translation of Ephesians 5:19: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.”

Spirituals emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, rooted in both African and European traditions. Many began in the Bahamas but also in America. Enslaved Africans brought with them rhythmic patterns, call-and-response singing, and expressive vocal styles, while exposure to Protestant hymns and psalms introduced biblical themes and melodic frameworks. Out of this fusion came a new kind of music—songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—that were used for worship, comfort, and sometimes even as coded messages for escape along the Underground Railroad. The spiritual “Go Down, Moses” was most likely a code for escape used by Harriet Tubman and others to identify themselves to enslaved people ready to run away to the north.

As the nineteenth century abolitionist, former slave and author Fredrick Douglass, wrote in his book My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) of singing spirituals during his years in bondage: “A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of ‘O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan,’ something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the North, and the North was our Canaan.”

So, are spirituals America’s “original” folk music? In one sense, yes. Unlike the English, Irish, or Scottish ballads that settlers brought across the Atlantic, spirituals were created here, on American soil, in response to uniquely American circumstances. They gave voice to a community denied freedom and recognition, and in doing so, they became a foundation for much of the country’s later music, from gospel to blues to jazz. Few other genres can claim to be as purely American in their origins.

At the same time, spirituals were not the only early folk music in the United States. Appalachian songs and fiddle tunes, though rooted in European traditions, took on new forms in the hills and valleys of the American frontier. Indigenous peoples had vibrant musical traditions long before colonization, and other immigrant groups—from German to Mexican to French—brought folk styles that enriched the country’s cultural mix. To call spirituals the only “original” American folk music would overlook this wider picture.

In my opinion, the ​best way to see it is this: spirituals stand as one of the most uniquely American branches of folk music, along with Native American music tied to specific ceremonies, while Appalachian and immigrant traditions represent other vital roots. Together, they form the living soil from which the United States’ diverse musical culture has grown.