Burleigh's Achievement
Harry T. Burleigh (1866-1949) was the first African American musician to arrange the spirituals as art songs for concert performance, and his 1917 setting of 'There Is a Balm in Gilead' for voice and piano was the work that launched this tradition. Burleigh had grown up hearing the spirituals from his grandfather, who had been enslaved, and he was the first Black student admitted to the National Conservatory of Music in New York, where he sang for and befriended Antonín Dvořák. He served as baritone soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church on Stuyvesant Square for over fifty years.
The concert arrangement of 'Balm in Gilead' preserves the spiritual's melody and text while surrounding it with a sophisticated piano accompaniment that draws on post-Romantic harmonic language. The piano texture - sustained chords with a gentle inner voice moving - creates an atmosphere of luminous calm around the voice, as if the balm of the text were being musically realized in the sound itself. The first major performance of this arrangement was by the tenor Roland Hayes, who sang it at Carnegie Hall to an audience that included many who had never heard a spiritual in a concert setting before.
The Inversion of Jeremiah
The spiritual takes up one of the most desolate questions in the Hebrew Bible: 'Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of the daughter of my people not been restored?' (Jeremiah 8:22). Jeremiah asks this question in a moment of prophetic despair - the people have been destroyed by their faithlessness, and no healing seems to be available. The balm of Gilead was a real medicinal substance, a resin from trees in the Transjordanian highlands used in ancient medicine; Jeremiah uses it as a metaphor for the divine healing that should have been available to Israel but has been forfeited through sin.
The enslaved community who created the spiritual performed a remarkable theological inversion: they took Jeremiah's despairing rhetorical question and answered it with a confident declaration. 'There IS a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.' This inversion is not naive optimism but resurrection hermeneutics: the enslaved community read the question through Christ's death and resurrection and found that the answer Jeremiah could not yet see had been given in the gospel. Isaiah 53:5 - 'by his wounds we are healed' - is the theological link that makes the inversion possible.
The Dual Healing
The spiritual's text speaks of balm that heals the 'wounded' and the 'sin-sick soul' - a dual healing that corresponds to the dual burden of the enslaved community: the physical wounds of slavery and the spiritual wound of sin. The spiritual refuses to separate these two dimensions of healing, insisting that the same divine balm addresses both. This integral understanding of salvation - that God's healing is physical and spiritual, communal and individual - was central to the Black church's theology and its resistance to the false consolation that offered spiritual freedom while accepting physical oppression.
The subsequent verses of the spiritual extend this theme: 'If you can't preach like Peter, if you can't pray like Paul, you can tell the love of Jesus and say he died for all.' This democratic extension of the healing ministry - every believer can share the balm even if they lack Paul's eloquence or Peter's authority - is characteristic of the spiritual tradition's egalitarianism, rooted in Galatians 3:28 ('there is neither slave nor free').
Legacy and Performances
Burleigh's arrangement made 'Balm in Gilead' the most internationally performed spiritual. It was sung by Roland Hayes across Europe and America, and by Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, and Kathleen Battle in subsequent generations. The arrangement is now standard in vocal pedagogy programs and is performed by singers of every background. Its presence in the repertoire of non-Black classical singers marks both the spiritual's musical universality and the continuing question of cultural appropriation that Burleigh's own work navigated throughout his career.