Most of the spirituals I used in the poems were collected by musicologists during and just after the Civil War. They can be found in Slave Songs of The United States. The musicologists tried to be true to the dialect in their transcriptions. I understand their decision, but chose to use traditional spellings, because for me their phonetic spellings had echoes of black-face minstrel shows that used dialect to mock African-Americans. All art incorporated into these pages is either public domain (usually {PD-1923}} – published anywhere before 1923 and public domain in the U.S.) or is used with permission .
Follow these links to learn more about the poems and the letters and spirituals that inspired them.
