The Blues Connection - Spirituals, Prison work call and response. The chants, songs, cries and poems of people whose suffering, misery and deprivation goes beyond anything we can envisage today. These echoes of the past are what evolved into the blues we now enjoy. 

In the 19th century, the word 'Spirituals' essentially meant folksongs. Although often rooted in biblical stories, they also showed us the hardships of people enslaved from the 17th century onwards. Many new genres, including what we now call the blues, emerged from the spirituals. But as we shall see, the feeling we now call the blues existed long before the spirituals. It was already an element within them — only the format we are familiar with today was different. 

Our journey started with a wonderful lady — Mammy Prater. Her real name was Annie, but she preferred Mammy. Born into slavery in 1805, she was our inspiration to research the earliest roots of these songs and their connection with the blues. 

Download: - Prison work song - Go Down, Old Hannah.

Go Down, Old Hannah ... 'Old Hannah' in this instance is a metaphorical name for the sun used by inmates in Texas prison camps. The song is a traditional African American prison work song about the punishing heat of the sun in Texan prison farms. Prisoners sing for the sun to go down to end their daytime work and not to rise again the next morning. This particular recording (there are many more) is from Texas ​Retrieve State Prison dated 1939.