Spirituals tell stories people must not forget, said Clarence Jones, a retired educator in Baton Rouge who has taken seriously the effort to preserve the special songs spun out of slavery.

Jones will be in Natchez this week to present “Dialect and Messages of Negro Spirituals” at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration.

His presentation at 3:15 p.m. Thursday at the Natchez Convention Center is one of more than a dozen lectures during the four-day event devoted to the theme, “Southern Accents: Language in the Deep South.”

Jones began to fear the loss of spiritual songs about 30 years ago, when he organized the Heritage Choir in Baton Rouge and began methodically to build a repertoire for the choir to take nationally and internationally.

A highlight of his travels with the choir was singing for Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

It is a long way from the cotton fields to Rome, but the messages of spirituals are universal, Jones said.

“Sometimes the message is religious. Sometimes it is social. Sometimes it just tells truths about activities going on in the slave communities,” he said.

The music remained important in the years after slaves were freed, he said. “We didn’t get the forty acres and a mule we were promised. We didn’t have any riches. All we had were the songs,” Jones said.

The songs reminded the singers of the “trials and tribulations of the people. And they showed the kind of character we had to have to come through such experiences — a belief in God and a belief that God would carry us through,” he said.

“Out of some very degrading experiences came songs of dignity, hope and belief.”

Archivists have logged about 6,000 spirituals that have survived. “They weren’t written down,” Jones said.

The music was passed from generation to generation. And, like jazz and the blues, improvisation played a part in the ultimate form that became the written spiritual song arrangement.

“The element of improvisation bleeds over into the way we dance, the way we dress, the way we cook, the way we do our hair,” Jones said.

“It came out of an experience of not having. We have no boundaries about the way we think about artistry or, for that matter, the way we think about things we need,” he said.

Most music lovers hear spirituals as religious songs. Those who know the history hear more than that, Jones said.

“Sometimes the words were mixed to get messages out there about something the slaves didn’t want the master to know,” he said.

And sometimes the words that speak of the “after life do not always refer to heaven,” Jones said. “Sometimes it’s about the world after slavery.”

The language of spirituals reflects two truths, he said. Slaves were not allowed to speak their own languages. And they were not taught to read.

“So they might not have been grammatically correct, but they knew how to communicate the message,” he said.

Jones grew up in Morgan City, La., loving music in church and school and taking part in choir and band.

He attended Southern University and earned a degree in music and then spent years in education and in playing music for churches throughout Baton Rouge.

“I’m looking forward to coming to Natchez,” he said. “I’m looking forward to telling about spirituals. This is something we’re very proud of and something worth saving.”