Make a soulful sound: from its African origins to blues, Harry Belafonte, in his recently released anthology, traces the musical heritage of black Americans. (culture in context).

IN THE BEGINNING WAS NOT THE WORD, BUT THE DEAFENING silence of slavery, or so Harry Belafonte argues in his recently released The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music (BMG/Buddha Records), a five-CD box set of 80 songs tracing the musical odyssey of black Americans from West African work songs through the birth of the blues at the start of the 20th century.

In the early '60s, singer, actor, producer, and activist Belafonte bemoaned America's ignorance of the rich musical heritage of the people who had invented spirituals, ragtime, the blues, jazz, bebop, R&B, and rock and roll. So, gathering an army of artists from around the country and globe, he labored for more than a decade fashioning this sweeping psalmody of war chants, shouts, spirituals, hollers, ballads, children's songs, lullabies, minstrel tunes, chain-gang work songs, and blues melodies. And then, because the original sponsors had dissolved their partnership, Belafonte's symphony of soul languished in an RCA vault for more than three decades before finally reaching our ears. Still, like freedom, it is a treasure worth the wait.

As Belafonte points out in the set's accompanying text, "when first brought to this continent, Africans were enjoined from speaking.... Slaves were not allowed to converse with one another until they learned the tongue of their masters." The genocidal practice of slavery demanded the destruction of the captured Africans' language and culture. Free men and women were to be made silent, stripped of their tongue and story and deprived of any voice that might cry out for justice or liberty. Then, teaching them to speak in the vocabulary of their oppressors, they were to be refashioned in the image and likeness of good Christian slaves who knew only to submit and obey.

But the strategy failed, and as this anthology makes clear, African Americans soon began to stretch the new wineskins of their oppressors' language, fashioning a distinctive, original, and ultimately world-shaping musical tongue and vocabulary, one that gave voice to their own African heritage and to the length and breadth of their sufferings, struggles, and prayers in the long road to freedom.

Belafonte's anthology is introduced with a sampling of African war chants, ballads, work songs, and the music of royal festivals and harvest ceremonies, bringing us some of the sounds of Nigeria, Ghana, and the Congo and giving us a taste of the musical heritage and vocabulary that African Americans would eventually plant in the soil of their new land. Listening to these melodies and songs dispels any notion that the men and women brought in chains to this country had come without an inheritance of song or soul. Savages is a word one could only use to describe those who would enslave such people.

The account of African enslavement begins with a disturbing rendition of "Amazing Grace" accompanied by an excerpt of a "slave preacher's" sermon instructing his audience to obey their masters at all times and followed by a sampling of "shouts" and early spirituals. Two of the shouts ("Knee-bone Bend" and "Yonder Comes Day") and one spiritual ("Prayer") are exquisitely rendered by Bessie Jones, whose Georgia Sea Islands community was still singing songs and hymns of slavery in the fashion of their ancestors when these recordings were made. Valentine Pringle is the vocalist for a haunting version of "O Lord, I'm Waitin' on You," and Belafonte performs the watcher's shout "Hark 'E Angel" with masterful grace.

WHILE SHOUTS AND EARLY SPIRITUALS expressed the hopes and prayers of enslaved Africans, the men and women living in captivity soon learned that they also needed an encoded musical language with which to communicate their plans for escape and freedom. As Belafonte notes, there were "songs used to provide escaping slaves with information, to pass along warnings, escape signals, and the like, or to cover up clandestine, escape-connected meetings."

In a section dedicated to the music of the Underground Railroad, Leon Bibb sings "Follow the Drinking Gourd," instructing runaways to follow the Big Dipper north to freedom, and Joseph Crawford is the vocalist for "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight," which told plantation hands of secret gatherings. At the same time, slave songs often expressed their sorrow and anguish over the cruelties of their captivity and the loss of so many loved ones through torture, death, sale, or escape. "Many Thousan' Gone" is a heartbreaking dirge for slavery's countless "disappeared."

With the onset of the Civil War, African Americans in both the North and South were anxious to lend a hand to the struggle that would end slavery, and Belafonte's anthology has a collection of martial tunes giving voice to this passion. Belafonte is the lead vocalist in "The Colored Volunteer," a quick-stepping parade song declaring the ready willingness of African Americans to "stand by the Union if we only have the chance" and promising that "the Union will be saved by the colored volunteer." And in the more somber but equally determined "We Look Like Men of War," the troops of the famous Black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment claim their full worth and dignity as fighting men, in no way inferior to the white soldiers alongside whom they served and died.

Early in the 19th century African Americans inherited and transformed the minstrel show, producing a richly developed piece of theater complete with a tapestry of songs, jokes, impersonations, and intricately choreographed dances. But white performers soon co-opted and corrupted this form of entertainment, putting on blackface and ridiculing the language and behavior of blacks, characterizing African Americans as "Jim Crow" and "Zip Coon." For more than half a century these racist shows were hugely popular among white audiences, perpetrating a bigoted and distorted vision of blacks as lazy, comic, and foolish creatures. The anthology recovers some pieces performed by African artists in black minstrel shows, stripped of the most offensive "coon" songs and jokes that usually made up the first third of these programs.

"AFRICANS," BELAFONTE NOTES, "WERE captured, enslaved, and brought to America for one reason--to work." And when the forced labor of slavery ended, it was replaced by the servitude of sharecropping and the bondage of the chain gang. The Southern legal system and its prisons were legendary for their brutality and racism, and in the late 1900s countless recently freed blacks traded in their shackles for the chains of the road or work gang.

For Belafonte, "African American work songs are among the most poignant, most moving in the pantheon of black musics," and the five pieces in the section on "muscles and sweat" offer a soul-wrenching hymnody from men struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of the backbreaking and mind-numbing toil. In "Good Ir'n" Belafonte is a straw boss goading and cajoling his crew as they stack rails, and in the blues tune "Nobody's Business but Mine" he leads a gang of gravel tampers singing to the beat of their tools.

The last pieces in the anthology are an anthem to the faith that has supported and sustained African Americans in the three-and-a-half-century struggle against slavery and oppression. In "My God Is a Rock in a Weary Land," Belafonte and his chorus sing of a lord that sides with the oppressed and stands with the downtrodden, and Howard Thurman's inspirational spiritual "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder" draws its audience into the promised land of freedom just over the next hill and encourages those on the long road to freedom to "keep on keeping on."

It may be just barely possible to listen to these songs and not be moved to clap, sing, or weep, but only if one has a genuinely stony heart. Harry Belafonte and his colleagues have assembled here a rich sampling of the songs of a people who almost single-handedly invented American popular and folk music, and brought out of the trunks of our deeply troubled and sinful history the spirituals, hollers, battle hymns, and work songs of men and women who would not be silenced by slavery, imprisonment, or discrimination, but would instead forge a joyful sound to the God who is the light along the long road to freedom. We are in their debt.