Collection
Du Bois Sorrow Songs
W.E.B. Du Bois's landmark 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk closes with a chapter called "The Sorrow Songs," in which Du Bois named what he considered the most significant Negro spirituals. He called them "the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people." Each chapter of the book opens with a bar of spiritual music paired with a line of European verse — Du Bois's argument, through structure itself, that the spiritual tradition stood as the equal of any artistic tradition in the world.
Du Bois was not simply cataloguing folk songs. He was making a case for Black humanity at a moment when that humanity was under relentless legal, political, and physical assault. To call these songs "sorrow songs" was to insist that the sorrow in them was real, historically located, and worthy of serious attention — and that the people who created them had not been diminished by their suffering but had, through it, produced something of permanent value.
The songs in this collection are those Du Bois quoted or referenced directly in The Souls of Black Folk, now in the public domain.
The songs in this collection are drawn from primary sources and scholarly collections in the public domain. Browse the full archive to explore spirituals across all four collections.
5 songs in this collection
Deep River
Deep River, My Home Is Over Jordan
One of the most recognized Negro spirituals, expressing a profound longing for deliverance — to cross the Jordan River into the promised land of peace and rest.
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Many Thousand Gone
No More Auction Block for Me; Many Thousand Go
A song that announces the end of slavery in the present tense. The auction block, the driver's lash, the pint of salt — each verse names what is finished, and the refrain counts the dead and the freed in the same breath: 'Many thousand gone.'
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Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen
Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had; Nobody Knows
A song of intimate witness — asserting that suffering is real, that it is known to God, and that glory is coming — sung in a minor key that holds grief and faith together without resolving the tension.
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Roll, Jordan, Roll
Roll, Jordan
The first song in the first published collection of African American spirituals — a Sea Islands shout in which the Jordan rolls forward and the singer asks to roll with it, into heaven, into freedom, into the next world this one cannot yet contain.
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Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Motherless Child
A lamentation for severed kinship — the defining wound of chattel slavery — sung in a minor key that plumbs sorrow without sentimentality, one of the most emotionally direct songs in the entire tradition.
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