African American Disaster Songs and Memory

Abstract

The final chapter draws general conclusions on the way African American singers and composers depicted disasters in their sacred and secular songs and on how their approach compares with the white one. A brief introduction to the interrelated concepts of memory (both collective and individual) and its different meanings is followed by a discussion of the field of study known as oral history and performance. After this theoretical treatment, a more empirical study based on the song lyrics’ analysis in the three preceding chapters enables to provide answers to the questions posed in the Introduction. African American blues and gospel singers and composers’ way of writing disaster songs is manifold, original, and impossible to pigeonhole. The difference between black and white disaster songs is much more substantial and less blurred. After drawing up some statistics on the songs analyzed, four tendencies common to blues and gospel disaster songs are detected.