Marian Anderson was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.
Anderson in 1940
Anderson at the Department of the Interior in 1943, commemorating her 1939 concert
Portrait of Marian Anderson by Laura Wheeler Waring (1944).
Painting by Betsy Graves Reyneau
Spirituals is a genre of Christian music that is associated with African Americans, which merged varied African cultural influences with the experiences of being held in bondage in slavery, at first during the transatlantic slave trade and for centuries afterwards, through the domestic slave trade. Spirituals encompass the "sing songs", work songs, and plantation songs that evolved into the blues and gospel songs in church. In the nineteenth century, the word "spirituals" referred to all these subcategories of folk songs. While they were often rooted in biblical stories, they also described the extreme hardships endured by African Americans who were enslaved from the 17th century until the 1860s, the emancipation altering mainly the nature of slavery for many. Many new derivative music genres such as the blues emerged from the spirituals songcraft.
Engraving of Douglass from his 1845 narrative
Portrait of James Weldon Johnson in 1932
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1875
Photograph of Harry T. Burleigh, 1936