Brown Prompt 3: Spiritual

    The song I chose is Deep River. I picked this song because it sounded pretty, and it mentioned Jordan and reminded me of the song Roll Jordan Roll from our discussion post this week. There are a couple different versions of it but it consistently contains the refrain, "Deep river, my home is over Jordan. Deep river, I want to cross over into campground." In this song, campground is repeated many times. "Camp" refers to a better, peaceful place in Christian tradition. This is a typical topic within spirituals, since they would often talk about the hardships African Americans faced as enslaved people. 

Here is a link to a performance of this song. This performance was done by Marian Anderson, who popularized this version of the spiritual. 

Here is a link to the source I used for this blog post.