There are other features in Negro singing especially connected with religious revivals which throw light on the characteristic traits of this people. Aggrey of Africa was a remarkable representative of the Negro race. His life, written by Edwin W. Smith, is one of the outstanding biographies of recent times. He once said, “I believe that the Negro has a great gift for the world; the gift of the idea of meeting injustice and ostracism and oppression by sunny light-hearted love and work. I believe he is going to teach that to Asia and the white folk.” His attitude to life is best expressed in songs as indicated by a few illustrations in this chapter. Dr. Willis J. King, president of Samuel Houston College, Austin, Texas, in a recent article in _The Christian Advocate_, pointed out The Value of Negro Spirituals “The peculiarity of both the melody and the dialect of the spirituals tends to make them difficult for people other than American Negroes to render. But these difficulties are being overcome. With increasing frequency they are being rendered by white American choirs and congregations. Some of them, like ‘Lord, I Want to be a Christian’ and ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?’ are quite singable, after brief rehearsals, by the ordinary church group of any race or nationality. So it would seem not too much to expect that a number of these spirituals will ultimately find their place among the great hymns of the Church, and be sung down through the ages by Christians of every land.” The ability to sing the spirituals depends upon Finding the Soul of the Song Dr. Bruce S. Wright tells of a well-known American-Italian tenor who said that he never sang a selection until he found out the soul of the number. For that reason he refrained from singing Negro spirituals until he had spent considerable time in the South living among the Negroes, listening to them sing. So today he sings “Steal Away” as he heard it sung at a Negro revival; and he sings “Goin’ Home” as he heard it sung at the dying bed of an aged Negro in a Negro’s cabin. Here is a vivid description by Annemarie Ewing in _The Christian Herald_: How the Negroes Sing “In the huge stadium, dropped like a bowl beneath the starlit sky, thousands of people sit waiting to hear the Hall Johnson Choir. Overhead the sky is indigo, dotted with twinkling stars, glorious with the cool silver of a full moon. A tender, capricious wind breathes softly over the semicircle of the waiting crowd. “Now they come—a handful of Negroes, perhaps a dozen men and a half dozen women. So small a group looks lost on the big platform. At a signal from their leader they begin. ‘Wade in de water, chillun, God’s a’goin’ to trouble de water...’