The American Vocalist. Spirituals and Folk Hymns, 1850-1870

Warner Classics presents a programme conceived by the Boston Camerata ensemble which have dedicated themselves to historically performed professional performance of early European and American Music. 

The American Vocalist is named after a book on canticles published in Boston in mid-19th-century, which reveals the persistence in religious chants of New England of a folk-hymnody tradition as part of a fascination for the Victorian aesthetic. This was generally regarded as a specificity of the Afro-descendant congregational music of the Southern states.