Blues is unholy, and sacred music unbluesy. Blues celebrates pleasures of the flesh, while sacred music celebrates release from wordly bondage. One is oil to the other’s holy water, unmixable. At least some would have it so. Once viewed as the twin populist voices of African-American culture, blues and gospel music traditions have gradually come to be seen as existing on either side of a dualist divide crossed only at peril to one’s soul. We have come to believe that the choices offered African-Americans were those of mutual exclusion: either blues or gospel music, God or the Devil, Heaven or Hell. The blues singer took the latter, sometimes striking Faustian bargains for greater mastery of “the devil’s music”. Today, many blues aficionados regard blues singers, especially the male blues singers of the Mississipi Delta, as twentieth-century African-American analogues to the nineteenth-century Romantic poets, who rebelled against social convetion, stole Promethean fire with their art, and died young of laudanum addiction, tuberculosis, syphilis, or suicide. The mith of the Byronic poet-brilliant, defiant and self-destructive-has sustained its great power and resonance for more than 150 years of Western culture. That myth is subtext to our continued fascination with such dissimilar icons of the 1950s as the beat poets and the country singer dubbed “the hillbilly Shakespeare,” Hank William. It has been the raison d’etre of many rock stars, living and dead. The myth tells us that life and art are inseparable. For the Romantic artist, life and art must both defy taboos, roil with internal and external conflict, and ultimately martyr the artist. The problem with projecting this myth onto blues singers is thatthe culture in which they lived and worked was one with no tangible link to the Romantic tradition. If some bluesmen believed they were playing “the devil’s music” and if a few bragged of it with such appelations as “The Devil’s Son-in-Law”, none seem to have equated “demonic defiance” with an alternate route to some higher truth, the evident goal of European Romantics (a goal voiced by the well-worn phrase from William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”). The Romantic deification of the individual is fundamentally foreign to African-American culture, and the projection of a Byronic character onto blues singers (most visibly, of course, onto Robert Johnson) tells us more about the observer than the observed.  Thisn’t to say that the dualism of “the devil’s music” as stark opposite to “songs of praise” is something white intellectuals have merely imagined to recreate the bluesman in our own image. No, there is ample evidence to suggest that an either/or sensibility was one with which blues singers truly grappled. There is also reason to believe that the culture in which they lived was more forgiving of them than its religious rhetoric might, on the surface, suggest. How else can we explain the men who worked variously as blues singers and preachers, apparently without becoming pariahs in their communities? Blues and sacred music served different social functions in African-American culture. The experiences they exemplified were in conflict, but the musics associated with this conflict were not as strictly segregated from one another as our paradigm of the Byronic bluesman may lead us to believe. Blues came into an African-American culture in which the ecstatic Holiness and Pentecostal churches were spreading, and those populist faiths embraced eclectic musical expression. Conversely, blues, a new idiom at the turn of this century, could not help but be in part shaped by the varied and venerable African-American sacred music traditions, nearly two centuries its senior. The forced migration was followed by further dehumanization: the dissolution (via the auction block) of any tribal or familial ties that had survived the passage from Africa. Expressions of African culture and religion were largely suppressed, as were any gatherings that might be seen as a pretext for insurrection. Stripped of past cultural identity and denied all opportunity to form new ones, the African in American was without any institution offering a cultural core, a meeting place beyond the white purview and a world view-until the rise of the African-American church. The first recorded baptism of an African in the North American colonies took place in 1641. Missionary zeal in North American was tempered by a troubling question: Did Baptizing an African confer freedom upon him? Laws were passed to the effect that it did not, but there was still little rush ti Christianize the colonists’ human chattel. This changed in the 1730s with the Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept England and America and that at last deemed slaves worthy converts. Among the missionaries who came to America in the 1730s  was John Wesley, founder of Methodism. His preachments were underscored by the hymns of Dr.Isaac Watts, an English minister, physician, and composer whose music was livelier and whose lyrics closer to the vernacular speech of the day than what the stiff psalms of the day then offered. Colonial editions of Watt’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs first appeared in 1739 and proved particularly popular with slaves. The religious instruction offered them by Wesley and like-minded missionaries included both Holy Writ and hymns, which emphasized its lessons. Over a million blacks lived in the United States by 1800, comprising 19 percent of the nation’s population. More than one hundred thousand were free, and among these freedmen were the founders of the first African-American denominations. Richard Allen founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1794, and in 1801, published the first American hymnal designed solely for a black congregation’s use. The creation of separate black churches was in part a response th white unease at a black presence in American houses of worship, but it also provided a true community center beyond white sanction and observation. That center proved a pillar of strength for generations and produced the community’s leaders in its preachers, who took to heart Watts’s advice: “Ministers…ought also to cultivate tha capacity of composing spiritual songs and exercise it along with the other parts of worship, preaching and prayer”. A Second Awakening swept America in the early years of the nineteenth century, characterized by week-long encampments (camp meetings) in wooded areas, with constant preaching, praying, and singing. The black presence at these camp meetings often exceeded that of whites. The camp meeting songs that were a significant part of the orally transmitted “spiritual” tradition took shape at this time. In 1867 the first collection of spirituals was pubblished, Slave Songs of the United States, collected by William Allen, Charles Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison. Among its contents were the hymns of Dr.Watts as well as folk spirituals, which would find their way, albeit in altered form, onto 78s in the 1920s. In 1866, Fisk University, open to black students, was established in Nashville. From its ranks came the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the first group to 2concertize” spirituals. The Fisk Jubilee undertook their first national tour in 1871; a world tour in 1886 was done and vastly expanded appreciation of African-American sacred song, albeit in a smoothed-over and Europeanized form. Elements of African-American worship and sacred song remained constant for generations, but this tradition was by no means impervious to change. Change has tremored more rapidly and radically through it in the past hundred years than during any other epoch, beginning in the 1890s with the denominations. Populist and ecstatic, the Holiness churches shook with shouts and primitive jazz bands. An even more virulent strain of experiential Christianity emerged prior to World War I with the spread of Pentecostalism, emphasizing trance states and speaking in tongues. Unlike the black music that accompanied the Great Awakening of the 1730s and the Second Awakening with its camp meeting some seventy years later, the music of these religious upheavals is audible to us, thanks to Edison’s invetion of 1877. Many composers and great singers got famous worldwide throught the religious music: Thomas Dorsey, Rev.Gates, Arizona Dranes, Blind Willie Johnson, Washington Phillips, Gary Davis, Bertha Lee, The Tindley Quaker City gospel Singers, The Golden Gate Quartet, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, The Swan Silvertones, The Stample Singers. By the way, the old Gospel tradition represents the cornerstone of the black history, fundamental to get a wider idea about the variegated and complicated afro-american cultural heritage.