One of the challenges of arranging a Negro Spiritual for solo singing is that one has to go from a multi-stanza environment for communal singing. That is to say, one has a folk melody of relatively narrow range repeated many, many times. One of the advantages is that the melody of Spirituals show the beauty and flexibility of simplicity. Here I quote the melody of "Lord, I Want to Be a Christian In My Heart, up to the last point at which it does not begin to repeat itself.
Like many Spirituals, this melody has the range of a sixth, with a nice mix of steps and small skips, entirely inside the pentatonic space. This is a grand advantage in terms of what harmony is available. Obviously the major mode is available:
But the minor mode works equally well:
And, because the melody is pentatonic, one can do major and minor mode at the same time:
Then we get on to melodic variations... with just a single accidental, one can change the melody enough to use the "Judas" minor harmony variant I am using in the verse "I don't want to be like Judas":
Yet beyond that, inside the style of this music there are specific ways to vary a melody ... in practice, no line is ever QUITE repeated in even authentic communal singing in this style. As in jazz, participants add their own feeling to a melody, and using the pentatonic pattern and going higher and lower, it is easy for melody 1 to birth the other 3 variants, any of which can be sung with the basic melody and not clash owing to the pentatonic scale:
In a nutshell, the preceding examples show how it is that there are so many variants of Spirituals that came through from the period in which Africans were cruelly enslaved and yet created this incredible music -- within it, there was all kinds of room for the freedoms of expression and creativity that simply could not be taken away. And, the legacy continues, as new composers take of the creativity left to us and keep on creating variants. Now that I have nearly completed arranging this Spiritual, the richness of its simple melody, and all that can be done with it, continues to astound me!
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