The Afro-American Art Songs and Spirituals recital at the Old Baptist Foundation Recital Hall presented some religious-sounding roots of African-American songwriting.

As baritone Donald Black, a graduate student in opera from Birmingham, Ala., sang Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child no one in the audience dared look away from his telling facial expressions and pleading hands. The graduate student in opera was giving his first recital but did not show it, as he must have quelled all the stomach butterflies with his beaming vocal confidence. Black sang with a certain yearning to accentuate the feeling of the tune. He said the song is an exercise in emotion rather than vocal range or quality.

On Minstrel Man, a number originally written by Margaret Bonds, notes of SIUC School of Music professor Wilfred Delphin’s internationally acclaimed piano playing trickled slowly like rain drops dripping down a window on a rainy day. While Black sang with his right hand braced on the middle of the piano for the number, Delphin manipulated the piano with surgical accuracy.

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When mezzo-soprano Tasha Gwin, a graduate student in opera, performed Compensation, she stood with her left hand lightly gracing her mid-section, seemingly conjuring up the power in her voice while monitoring her breathing.

Her head darted about when she sang the up-tempo section of Genius Child:Nobody loves a genius child, she sang as Delphin downshifted and slowed the tempo to a crawl. But as she slowed her voice, a finger-induced-fury of piano playing sped like rushing water in the rapids of a white water canoe trip and then halted like a fatal accident.

Roderick George, a graduate student in opera from Mobile, Ala., showed the crowd of 60 at the Old Baptist Foundation Recital Hall what a life-long tenor could do with Hall Johnson’s His Name So Sweet.

I’ve just come from the fountain/ Leon, Do you love Jesus?/ His name so sweet, George eloquently sang from his heart.

When George ended the song with his all-powerful voice stretching the eardrums of audience members, it made for a Kleenex moment.

Why didn’t they tell us to bring tissue? one audience member whispered to another.

Trying to Get Home, which George did a remarkable job on in his full thick tone, was another treat for audience ears.

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The three opera singers came together for the last tune, I Love the Lord Who Heard My Cry, in harmonic fashion. Black led them with his bass-filled voice for a brief moment, and then the three reconvened to trio fashion.