You don't need to hear the choir sing to know that spirituals are in trouble. Just walk into church and take a look.
If you see a drum set in the corner, Lucy Kinchen says, don't expect to hear "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" or "Go Down Moses" during worship.
"It just makes me sick," says Kinchen, whose Lucy Kinchen Chorale performs spirituals and classical compositions. "The music is the same music they hear when they go to clubs at night -- just different words. They're being entertained -- they're not worshiping."
Kinchen, whose El Cerrito living room has a fine view and a grand piano, belongs to a growing movement that is trying to preserve the Negro spiritual.
"There is a real danger they could become extinct," says Sam Edwards, a San Francisco social worker and co-founder of Friends of the Negro Spiritual.
Could Negro spirituals -- songs like "Deep River," "Swing Low Sweet Chariot," and "There Is a Balm in Gilead" -- really go the way of Tin Pan Alley and glitter rock?
Some people say yes.
In black churches, contemporary gospel has shoved spirituals aside, Edwards says. On the radio, there's nothing. At Reid's Records in Berkeley, a leading gospel retailer, spiritual CDs are scarce.
Many young people, even those who attend church, don't realize that spirituals were written by slaves, Kinchen says -- and some don't even know African Americans were enslaved.
The threat is nationwide, says Jason Oby, a classically trained singer and associate professor at Texas Southern University in Houston. Last year he convened a conference on African American church music. Its conclusion: Church music is narrowing to one type, contemporary gospel à la Kirk Franklin. Losing out, Oby says, are anthems, hymns, oratorios and spirituals.
"It's great music! They're wonderful!" Kinchen says of spirituals. "It's a really refined form of art. We've got really great music here that black people don't know about."
People who love spirituals are working hard to save them -- by performing them, writing about their history, and pushing for them in their local churches.
"We need to have at least one spiritual sung at every church," Kinchen says. "It needs to be part of the worship service.
The Bay Area has several non-church choral groups that focus primarily on spirituals, including Kinchen's Chorale and Bill Bell's Oakland Alameda Community Chorus.
Some larger black churches, including Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland and Jones United Methodist in San Francisco's Fillmore district include spirituals during worship. In Palo Alto, the Rev. Isaiah Jones is composing cantatas in the style of spirituals.
And in the three years since its founding, Friends of Negro Spirituals has become known nationwide for its Web site and journal. The group holds quarterly meetings in West Oakland featuring musical and academic speakers and lively group sings.
"Spirituals touch you in a way other things don't," says Pamela Williams, who sings with Bell's chorus. "Other music gets the hips moving but doesn't get the spirit moving."
Edwards, who is neither particularly religious nor a singer, says his dedication to spirituals came about as "an instantaneous conversion" while dining with Lyvonne Chrisman of Oakland -- the group's other founder -- and listening to a CD by the Moses Hogan Chorale.
"I can't explain it," says Edwards, a bearded man who looks like the sort of teacher a kid would go to with a problem. "I think the ancestral spirit spoke through that music."
The next day, he was on the phone to Hogan, who lived in New Orleans, and within weeks he was talking up the chorale's upcoming Bay Area concerts on radio and in churches. Hogan, the leading contemporary arranger of spirituals, died in February after an illness.
Today, Edwards and Chrisman, an administrative assistant who worships at Allen Temple, say Friends has taken over their lives. "We don't have time to do much else," Edwards says.
John Patton, a singer and voice teacher at Richmond's East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, remembers when the spiritual choir Wings Over Jordan had a popular half-hour show every Sunday on CBS radio. He joined the group in 1948 shortly before it folded as its youngest singer, and loved the music so much he was almost fired.
"Every time the basses dropped down to those low notes it was like thunder," he says. "You could feel your body reverberate. I would break down in tears -- and I was in the front row. (The conductor) said 'Patton, I can't have you doing that. You distract the audience.' I said, 'It's the last time.' "
Preserving spirituals means different things to different people. Edwards and Chrisman love the artfully arranged concert versions that are most often heard today -- but they'd like to save the folksier-styled congregational spirituals, as performed at their meetings.
"We've in part brought it back as it used to be --improvised field songs," Edwards says. "It was a property of the community that sang together."
The Rev. Michael Williams, pastor at St. James Baptist Church in San Francisco, enjoys classically arranged "European format" spirituals. But he says the real challenge is preserving spirituals in their less sophisticated, vernacular form as part of contemporary worship.
"When you use the word 'preserve,' " he says, "I think of taxidermy. Roy Rogers' horse has been taxidermied -- but he's not alive anymore."
Patton, an imposing gentleman of 72 who breaks into Handel and Bach to prove a point, says he dedicated himself in 1970 to preserving spirituals by singing them in concert.
His focus is the heritage of the great African American composers and choir directors who arranged the spirituals for choral groups. That is also Bell's focus.
"Black composers have never gotten their due," he says. In March, his choir honored these forgotten arrangers with a concert in Oakland.
Bell is equally well known in the Bay Area as the "Jazz Professor" for his longtime role as a jazz pianist and as music chairman at the College of Alameda.
The real value of spirituals, fans agree, is spiritual and historical. Spirituals sustained black Americans during the days of slavery and retain that same psychological, religious and emotional value today.
"I once heard a young child, she was about 10, sing 'Jesus Loves Me Yes I know, for the Bible Tells Me So,' " Patton says. "Now her voice cracked when she did this one. You wouldn't call that a great voice. But it was the sincerity and the conviction and the feeling she brought to it.
"The spiritual must have the cry in it. True black music has the cry in it, because of the travail and the suffering we have suffered all these years. It is in the psyche. It comes through in everything we sing."
"I think they have a lot of power to them," Edwards says. "You listen to the songs, you don't hear a lot of overt expressions of hatred. You hear a lot about forgiveness, a lot about their having faith, their willingness to sit at the peace table and break bread with the people who oppress them.
"You're talking about some tenets from the Bible, forgive your neighbor and all that. That is not highly esteemed in our culture today. People are fighting each other and killing each other."
Bill Bell says singing spirituals is an emotional, humbling experience.
"This music tells exactly what happened to a people at a certain time -- and what continues to happen. Many of us are of a mind that the struggle is not over for African Americans," he says, then contrasts their effect with contemporary gospel. "To just jump up and down and have a good time and say something over and over again is not my idea of the worshiping or praising experience."
Spirituals may have started as folk songs, but there was never anything simplistic about their lyrics or musical structures, Kinchen says. It was easy for composers to create classical music from them because spirituals already possessed musical and lyrical complexity and compelling melodies.
At Jones United Methodist, a medium-size church in San Francisco, minister of music Aleece J. Carson chooses music that "resonates with the congregation" -- which means almost anything from Handel to contemporary gospel to hip-hop.
"We want to give them music where they are," she says, "but we don't want them to forget certain things."
That means spirituals. Her adult choir learns to sing them in a classical style -- and she has the congregation sing them folk style. "Any time I pick one for a congregational song," she says, "the sanctuary just lights up. It comes alive."
But today, many congregations are never asked to sing a spiritual.
Modern gospel has pushed spirituals out, Kinchen says, and she has an idea why. "It's easier and cheaper, and more appealing to the youth."
Spirituals require singers who can read music, Bell says, and have the patience to rehearse. "Gospel music is so much easier to perform," he says. "You don't have to be so particular about choral precision and dynamics and intonation."
Bell used to direct a choir at an Oakland church, but as the church moved toward wall-to-wall gospel, he shifted his choir to the College of Alameda. Today his 55-member choir meets at the Alice Arts Center in Oakland.
Kinchen, who led choral groups for many years at Laney College in Oakland and was co-chairwoman of the music department, feels so strongly that when she was asked to lead a gospel choir she refused.
"I said, 'I do not do gospel music. I do spirituals. I do classical music. ' I said, 'I'm here to teach. Every black student here who goes to church already knows gospel music.'
"Gospel music can't compete in any way, in either the complexity or the melodic beauty of the spiritual," she says.
But gospel has an appeal that's hard to beat.
"When you compete with gospel," Bell concedes, "gospel wins out because of the bigness and loudness of it. Gospel singing is something overpowering -- or over-singing, I'd say."
Some people shy away from spirituals because they're ashamed of slavery, Carson says.
Some of her voice students don't like the dialect. "The 'dese' and 'dose, ' the 'de ribber.' To keep it pure and honor what the spiritual does and did, you would want to use all the language. But people consider it ignorant. I go into that and explain all of that. And of course they still refuse to do it. And I understand that, too."
Young people are particularly hard to reach, says Patton, who works with them in Richmond.
"Do you know that there are many young black children who have never heard of spirituals and don't know what the music is about?" he says. "Well, that's terrible. They need to know that."
At Jones, Carson says, kids enjoy singing a form of hip-hop at church. Their reaction to spirituals? "Oh, that's nice. But let's not do more than one. "
"We need to get spirituals on records and into the mainstream, to be heard," the Rev. Jones of Palo Alto says. "Kids hear gospel on the radio; if they heard spirituals they would like them." He'd like to record spirituals using contemporary instrumentation.
Patton, however, remains a purist. Adding modern instrumentation might sell records, he believes, but would be "manipulative frivolity."
"Spirituals should be sung with the same solemnity, dignity and seriousness that we attach when we sing Handel's 'Messiah,' " he says.
"I have seen grown men, white and black, reach for handkerchiefs at the conclusion of 'Deep River' because they felt it. They were moved by it. They felt it intuitively because it reached the depth of their soul -- because they allowed it to reach the depth of their soul."