Negro Folk-Songs Book 3 & 4

The question was eagerly put by a young German musician who was visiting the Hampton Institute in Virginia and for the first time heard the great chorus of nine hundred colored students sing the Plantations, as the Negroes call the old melodies that had their birth in days of slavery  religious songs that were the voice of the bondsman's soul. From a technical as well as purely musical standpoint the extraordinary unity, the precision in attack and the faultless pitch of the Negro singers impelled the musician's query. And my answer baf?ed him: Why, no one trains these Negro boys and girls, their singing is natural.