“The descendants of the people who created this music are still here and still alive,” said Groover-Flores. “And even if we do not know the names of their ancestors or who the composer is, we can do our part in acknowledging the work that their ancestors have contributed to this body of music that we appreciate today.”
Others have latched onto the project, including four churches that have given donations in support of the royalty project, a Hamilton-Garrett spokesperson said.
“It’s really straightforward,” said DeSelms, of why the Brookline church created the program. “This is music that we nonchalantly borrowed for hundreds of years and didn’t consider the fact that people wrote it and people created it and those people were never recognized.”
Old Cambridge Baptist Church, an American Baptist congregation about three miles from United Parish, has thus far sent Hamilton-Garrett $1,000 in royalties since learning of the Brookline church’s initiative. The Cambridge church also donated a Kimball baby grand piano valued at $7,000.
“This offers students of color in this neighborhood that would never have the opportunity to study music the opportunity to do so,” said Tom Jones, minister of music at the mostly white Cambridge church that started its Negro Spirituals Initiative in late 2021. “And that’s how we can pay it forward.”
M. Roger Holland, director of The Spirituals Project at the University of Denver, said he’s noticed this particular recent interest in Negro spirituals that, as folk music, have no copyright and are in the public domain.
“It seems to have picked up some steam within the last couple of years, particularly since the George Floyd murder,” he said of the 2020 killing of a Minneapolis Black man at the hands of a white police officer.
“I think it’s really admirable that certain communities are seeking to give back, to sew into, to participate in the rebuilding, the repair of the damage that has been done to the Black community for over 400 years in this country.”
The United Church of Christ Musicians Association held a webinar in February about the concept and donated $1,000 in proceeds from it to the Roxbury academy.
Jim Boratko, director of worship arts at First Church of Christ, Congregational in West Hartford, Connecticut, hosted the webinar for the independent association. His predominantly white suburban church started its Royalties for Spirituals program that same month and has made a $1,600 donation to Hartford’s Artists Collective, an education program that exposes the community and students to the artistic and cultural contributions of the African diaspora.
