Religion in Nashville’s African-American population during enslavement is quite interesting. Many African-American traditions throughout the South followed the same pattern: African spiritual traditions attempted to be kept, and the traditions were creolized marrying the Judeo-Christian values of their European counterparts. These traditions all merged and gave birth to hoodoo an Afro-centric spiritual tradition amongst African-Americans. Unlike other Afro-diasporic traditions, it is not as formalized. A particular tradition like Haitian vodun was easier to keep because of isolation from Europeans and a larger ethnic group sharing a homogenous identity, so a system was easier to form. Whereas in the United States, this could not be done as easily due to Africans being more heavily integrated among different ethnic groups, whites kept a careful eye and controlling hand on the population, and unlike other enslaved populations in the Americas there were more creolized enslaved forming in the US. This means that multiple generations were born in the United States during enslavement while other enslaved communities received a constant influx of Africans to maintain the population till their emancipation. This doesn’t mean culture died, but rather people have to be aware culture transforms when it is not in its native environment.

            Hoodoo has been a quintessential part of American culture since the arrival of enslaved Africans. If it wasn’t for Hoodoo scores of early colonial settlers would have died upon arrival in the New World. Many European settlers died from smallpox and snake poisoning and they entrusted the work of African herbalists essentially hoodooist to cure them because at this time African medicine was more advanced than European medicine. At one point about 90% of babies were being brought into the world by Black midwives. Now people might ask what does this have to do with Hoodoo? African medical traditions at the time could not be separated from their spiritual traditions (Holloway 2005). A clear example of this happening in Nashville concerns a man named Jack, the Root Doctor who owned his shop in the downtown Nashville area in the 1850s. He sold medicine to both Black and White customers and gave a portion of his earnings to his enslaver (Lovett 1999).

            A lot of Black religious institutions throughout slavery were kept under the watchful eye of Whites to make sure they weren’t becoming too independent. We can presume part of this was influenced by the Nat Turner rebellion. Now, there were some Blacks in the area running secret churches however we are not certain what their services would have looked like except from very few oral accounts which describe the integration of Christianity and African traditions. (Lovett 1999)

            When we look at slavery, we only see the atrocities and politics. We forget the culture that formed. We also forget that the people who came were people from a variety of occupations many of them were some form of clergy in their field.  They brought this knowledge with them.

Works Cited

Holloway, Joseph E. 2005. Africanisms in American Culture. 2nd. Bloomingtin, Indiana: Indiana University P.

Lovett, Bobby L. 1999. The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee. University of Arkansas Press.