The author defines spiritual folk song as asubject of ethnology of the present and ethnomusicology, and focuses on the contribution of this research to interdisciplinary hymnology. It represents one of the options of critical use of the model of ethnographic research of the present village performed by Václav Frolec with team at the Masaryk University in Brno in the 1970s and 1980s It is a thematic concept of research and a qualitative method which goes from the chronology of sources to the study of cultural continuity and cultural changes. The author modifies this methodology for research on songs and presents three case analyses 1. Current forms of ritual communication and the change from the spiritual to the secular
function of songs; 2. Two contexts of Baroque songs and contemporary culture; 3. Social function of the renewed customs and the origin of new Marian songs. Within this concept,
ethnomusicology and ethnology of the present are part of historical ethnology.