Abstract
When John C. Diamond asked me to respond to Anne Wimberly’s article “Spirituals as Symbolic Expression,” I was both intrigued and
somewhat skeptical of this undertaking. As I wrote him the letter saying that I would try to make such a response, I kept hearing in the back of my consciousness the qualification made by James Cone: “Black music must be lived before it can be understood.”1 Even as this claim resounded in the background, I decided to try it anyway.