Slave Songs or Blues?

     For my second book, I read Slave Songs of the United States, as well as did some outside online research on slave songs themselves. It was very interesting to read the words of these songs, in which a lot of the lyrics came directly from Black mouths. I picked this book because I wanted to try to find similarities between blue's and slave music. Both originated from African Americans in distress, but both are very different in the way those African Americans express their emotions and feelings of distress. The slave songs themselves, obviously, talk about slavery and God and how free they are going to feel once they get off this planet and go to Heaven and meet God and are finally relieved from the brutality of being a black human slave in America. Blues deals with similar topics but has a much more musically oriented tone. Blues songs have a real and raw lyric base with a musically entertaining melody; while slave songs are much more about the lyrics and the unease behind them than about the musical experience.
     After reading about slave songs, I'm honestly not sure whether I want to continue on a more narrow aspect of blues or a more narrow aspect of slave songs and slave culture within music. I'm hoping to get some feedback from you all to try and make my decision for sure. I am really very interested in both so either way, I will have a kick booty time researching.