IMSLP Forums

I was searching for spirituals yesterday, and couldn't find any. I looked up HT Burleigh's "Negro spirituals : arranged for solo voice", and it looks like a good candidate for upload. Published pre-1923 and Burleigh died in 1949.

I think "Negro Spiritual" or just "Spiritual" would be a good candidate for a new category. Probably a subcategory of "Song", but I don't know the ins and outs of the category system.

Edit: Relevant talk page http://imslp.org/wiki/Category_talk:Spiritual

Firstly, I should point out that the category mentioned above hasn't existed since 2010, and its talk page dated from 2009 (now deleted too).

Our categories are based on the Music Library Association's list, which doesn't include "Spritual" as a category. I suspect the problem is finding a watertight definition of this term. However, I'd suggest looking in Category:Folk Songs, American, which turns up all the ones categorized so far. As the numbers of potential spirituals are still in single figures, and 95% of works have already been categorized, my feeling is that we should probably let things stand for now, so we can concentrate on categorizing the remaining 5% (which still constitutes a hefty 3,232 works).