Sinéad O’Connor
This is a direct musical setting of Haile Selassie I's 1963 address to the United Nations, turned into a litany against racial…
racial injustice anti-colonialism Pan-Africanism
Sam Cooke
Sam Cooke takes the nineteenth-century African American spiritual and turns it into a showcase for pop-gospel phrasing,…
death and deliverance faith and longing for home African American spiritual tradition
Talking Heads
I Zimbra sets a 1916 Hugo Ball sound poem to a dense Afrobeat-influenced groove, turning nonsense syllables into pure rhythmic…
language as sound rather than meaning primitivism and appropriation of African rhythm Dada and avant-garde inheritance
Johnny Cash
An old African-American spiritual, reworked by Cash near the end of his life, this is a stark warning that moral reckoning is…
divine judgment mortality moral reckoning
Sandy Denny
This is a cover of a 1930s Tin Pan Alley standard, sung by Denny as a torch song that piles up extravagant vows of devotion…
devotion as performance romantic insecurity excess and hyperbole
The Staple Singers
This is The Staple Singers' rendition of the traditional African American spiritual "Jacob's Ladder," a call-and-response hymn…
spiritual ascent perseverance communal faith
Moby
This track isn't really a Moby lyric at all but a looped field-recording-style sample of an African American work/children's…
labor and repetition folk memory loss
Phoebe Bridgers
A song about being drawn back, again and again, to someone (or something) reckless and self-destructive, using the Peter Pan…
arrested development romanticized danger toxic intimacy
This is the Staples' take on an old African American spiritual, retelling the biblical Samson story as a folk ballad while a…
betrayal hidden strength divine retribution
This is a traditional African American spiritual, reworked here as a Staple Singers vocal showcase, built almost entirely on a…
death as release suffering and endurance faith under strain
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton's rendition of the traditional African American spiritual carol is a straightforward proclamation of the Nativity…
proclamation of good news communal celebration awe and reverence
Lead Belly
This is Lead Belly's performance of the well-known African American spiritual, a plainspoken plea for deliverance framed as a…
deliverance death and afterlife communal faith
Nick Lowe
This is Nick Lowe's arrangement of a traditional African American spiritual cumulative counting song, built around a…
religious catechism cumulative counting communal call-and-response
This is the Staple Singers' rendition of a traditional African American spiritual, one long believed to have carried coded…
deliverance/salvation biblical exodus imagery collective faith
Blossom Dearie
This is a breezy, affirmation-based love song built almost entirely on a call-and-response pattern of rhetorical questions and…
devoted love simplicity and certainty playful affirmation
Old Crow Medicine Show
This is Old Crow Medicine Show's string-band arrangement of a traditional Appalachian/African American folk song, a…
inherited folk tradition false promises and broken contracts domestic conflict
Bobby Darin
A well-worn Tin Pan Alley standard gets a brisk swing arrangement from Bobby Darin, who treats the song as a light, confident…
romantic inevitability imperfection accepted in love contentment over excitement
Randy Newman
Randy Newman voices a slave trader luring West Africans onto a ship bound for Charleston with a mock-seductive sales pitch about…
slavery and the slave trade American exceptionalism as propaganda irony and complicity
Nina Simone
A traditional African-American spiritual reworked into a nearly ten-minute incantation, tracking a sinner's frantic search for…
judgment and reckoning futility of escape divine justice vs. mercy
Patsy Cline
This is a classic Tin Pan Alley standard reworked through Patsy Cline's country-pop phrasing, built almost entirely around a…
reluctant surrender desire versus resistance emotional vulnerability
Abbey Lincoln
Oscar Brown Jr.'s lyric to Mongo Santamaría's polyrhythmic tune turns a percussion pattern into a vision of ancestral homeland…
ancestral memory and diaspora eroticism as metaphor for connection to homeland Black beauty and self-affirmation