Music is something to be lived, each measure and line tells a story. Songs tell the stories of those in society and carry their stories for hundreds of years to come. 

Songs that feature a call and response between one voice and an accompanying choir fill the pages of African American spirituals, the same music that Everett McCorvey works to keep alive.

McCorvey received his bachelor of music in vocal performance from the University of Alabama in 1979. In 1981, he received his master of music degree in vocal performance with an emphasis in choral conducting and in 1989 received a doctor of musical arts degree in vocal performance from the University of Alabama. 

According to McCorvey, growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, shaped his life in every way possible. 

Growing up just a few blocks from Martin Luther King Jr., McCorvey’s parents were heavily involved in the Civil Rights Movement. His father was a deacon at the same church where the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy was a minister, which led McCorvey to hear King’s sermons for many years.

According to McCorvey, King loved spirituals and would commonly quote their texts in his sermons.

These spirituals stemmed from the slaves who were brought over to the United States, and this is the story McCorvey is sharing with the world. 

McCorvey said the enslaved were not allowed to do many things, but the slave owners did allow them to attend church and sing. Through attending church, they learned about the characters in the Bible such as Moses, David and Jonah and those stories gave them hope.

He also said that the enslaved believed that if God took care of those characters, deemed the least in society, surely he would take care of them, as they felt they were the least in society. 

They created songs about these characters and they would sing these songs while they worked, giving them hope, and that is how these spirituals were born.

Living during the height of the Civil Rights Movement made McCorvey fall in love with music, specifically the music he heard in his church.

Choirs from all over, many being college choirs, came to McCorvey’s church to sing these African American spirituals in support of the Civil Rights Movement. McCorvey would listen to these choirs and he became inspired to keep these spirituals as a focus throughout his career. 

“I would hear these spirituals and this text and so it was really something that moved me greatly and something that I really wanted to have as a part of my musical life for my entire life,” McCorvey said.

The American Spiritual Ensemble was founded 30 years ago by McCorvey who says the mission of this group “is to keep the American negro spirit alive.” The 25 singers who travel with him keep this spirit alive by singing these African American spirituals across America and the entire world. 

McCorvery says gospel music is a spinoff of spiritual music that was introduced around the mid-1900s, whereas spirituals have been present for 400 years. 

“Gospel music is more, it uses more popular idioms, it uses drums, keyboards and a drum set, things like that. The chord structure is more along the lines of popular music,” McCovery said.

Spirituals, on the other hand, are typically sung unaccompanied, since they were sung while working, with one voice and a group response from a choir. Now choirs may have a keyboard or djembe, an African drum, accompanying the music.

The spirituals have become so embedded in American culture that people grow up singing these songs without ever knowing where they originated from. 

McCorvey told stories of a woman who thought “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” was just a song her mother sang when she put her to bed. He also talked about a man who told him how he grew up singing “Go Down Moses” in his synagogue and had no idea where the song had originated.

“I think that’s what happens with these spirituals . . . they have become a part of our, just really, American musical ecosystem, and a lot of times people don’t know where they came from,” McCorvey said. 

McCorvey believes these are songs that should be sung by everyone. They came into the world because of a very difficult time in America’s history, but now they have become true American folk songs.

“No other country in the world can lay claim to these songs. These are songs that were created here . . . now they are a part of the American musical canon,” McCorvey said.

McCorvey works to share the history and meaning of these spirituals with young singers so that they will carry them on as well.

“The way the music survives is by passing it down to the next generation,” McCorvey said.