Mother-Daughter Author Team Features the Art of the Spiritual in New Children’s Picture Book

Ella’s Sunday Song is a children’s picture book that introduces the Spiritual, a musical artform that emerged from centuries of slavery in the United States.

“The singing of Spirituals with a code was extremely important to the survival of enslaved people,” said author Irene Franklin. “Think of how brilliant the freedom-seeking conductors and enslaved people were to sing Spirituals to aid in escaping undetected.”

Nicole Franklin adds, “If pre-school aged children discover the art of double meanings, metaphors and poetry through this historical reference, that would be a powerful, learning outcome for their speaking and writing skills.”

The featured material in the 33-page children’s picture book is the Spiritual titled “Steal Away.” Public readings involving the two authors invoking moments of a community sing as both Franklins lead audience members as a chorus. 

Scholars claim more than six thousand Spirituals have been in existence.

Irene Franklin adds, “When working on this book, we had an opportunity to really explore the coded meaning. In researching this song, I discovered that there were several types of songs such as Signal Songs, Map Songs and songs implying that the run-away(s) made it to safety. ‘Steal Away’ was considered a Signal Song.”

“We’re both educators so there is a vocabulary list and bibliography for parents and teachers in the back pages of the book so they can follow up on the research we found. Mainly during religious gatherings, hymns were taught and the ‘hymns’ had special instructions. ‘Steal Away’ was one of them,” said Nicole Franklin.

Ella’s Sunday Song is distributed by KLE Publishing at https://klepub.com/nicole-franklin/ 

The book is available for purchase or as a donation to classrooms, organizations and libraries. Bulk orders are available by contacting the authors directly. With each purchase—through the publisher website only—the authors contribute a portion of the net profits to a different children’s charity every month.

Authors Irene & Nicole Franklin
Mother/daughter authors Irene and Nicole Franklin are members of a family of artists who cover music, dance, film, writing and photography. Both Irene and journalist husband, Donald E. Franklin, also had careers as educators. Irene Franklin is a retired public school music teacher who spent more than four decades working simultaneously as a private piano teacher and choir director/musician for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, MO. Nicole Franklin is an award-winning filmmaker also from St. Louis. Her work includes The Double Dutch Divas!, Journeys in Black:  The Jamie Foxx Biography, Gershwin & Bess:  A Dialogue with Anne Brown, the film series Little Brother, the feature film TITLE VII and the podcast series Before You Go featuring 100-year-old guests. Nicole is a university communications director and spent her career between Los Angeles and New York working as a news video editor on national network broadcasts for NBC, ABC and CBS television.