Five Spiritual Songs in High and Low Keys

Spirituals form the cornerstone of Margaret Bonds’s reputation, accounting for more of her total output than any other genre. This volume presents three previously unknown spiritual settings and three previously unknown transpositions of the familiar You Can Tell the World together with a new edition of the familiar transposition of You Can Tell the World and the previously unknown spiritual song Nebuchadnezzar. The result is three decades’ worth of extraordinary music, most of it previously unknown, that offers new insights into what Margaret Bonds termed the “Earthly poesy” of the spiritual as a genre.

– John Michael Cooper