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up enough to sustain themselves but by singing the spirituals and the blues. Paul Laurence Dunbar best embodied this tension. On the one hand, he could be pietistic in such poems as "A Hymn," and could poetically celebrate the spirituals, as he does "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in "When Malindy Sings ." On the other hand, he could be pessimistic in such poems as "Religion" (80-81). In this piece he claims that human tears are more meaningful to him than human prayers, and that human praxis in this world is more crucial than the human quest for personal salvation. Drawing on his sentiments re garding the failure of Reconstruction to realize improved racial rela tions and integration, Dunbar became the first black writer to create a literature of skepticism and despair (90). Dunbar was the literary bluesman of the Nadir. Hence, theomusicology can follow the use of the spirituals and the blues in each new generation of black protest, and in each epoch of new music; theomusicology can also follow the reading and revision of the spirituals and the blues in each new literary epoch. Up from the Nadir, through the Harlem Renaissance, and beyond Black Con sciousness, the
Black Sacred Music – Duke University Press
Published: Sep 1, 1990
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