Finding the Songs

I WAS POKING AROUND IN AN ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSTORE, BOLERIUM BOOKS in San Francisco, when I stumbled upon an old, dog-eared pamphlet with the title “Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860.” Both the subject and the dates caught my eye, and I recognized immediately that they challenged notions prevalent among scholars and the general public alike. It is commonly believed that slave revolts were rare, notable more for their absence than for their occurrence. Furthermore, 1619 is the year most often referred to as the starting point for slavery in North America, for that is when a cargo of captive Africans was brought to the British colony at Jamestown, Virginia, by a Dutch slaver. Placing not only slavery but slave revolts almost a century earlier was thought-provoking, to say the least.

Closer inspection told me the pamphlet had been published in 1939. Its author, Herbert Aptheker, was known to me since I’d grown up in a household where W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Banneker, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass were among a pantheon of heroes to be studied and emulated. Aptheker, I recalled, was a close associate of Du Bois and had written extensively on African American history. Yet Aptheker was also a controversial figure—as a historian, a communist, and even, allegedly, as a father.¹ Not only had McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” targeted his politics, but his politics were reputed to have made his scholarship of dubious quality. One thing was for sure, though: I had never heard of this pamphlet, much less read it, nor was I prepared for what I discovered in its pages.

In the pamphlet, Aptheker documented the frequency and consistency of rebellions beginning with one in a doomed Spanish colony in what is now South Carolina in 1526. Enslaved Africans brought there that very year staged a revolt, killing many of the Spanish before running off to join Indians in the neighborhood. Judging by the more than two hundred reported revolts from 1526 through the Civil War, I saw a pattern emerge, raising serious questions about how history has been constructed. That this pamphlet was publicly available eighty years ago raises more questions about how history continues to be constructed in the present day.

To avoid any ambiguity, Aptheker defined revolts or rebellions as qualitatively different from spontaneous outbursts or individual acts of resistance. To qualify as a revolt or rebellion in his definition, an event must have been planned or carried out by at least ten slaves with the intention of forcibly removing any obstacle to their freedom. While most rebellions ended in failure, there were nonetheless numerous instances in which groups of slaves managed to flee to remote locations such as the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia or to join Native peoples hostile to, first, colonial administrations, then to the US government. These revolts erupted within a broad field of individual or smaller group acts of insubordination, sabotage, and escape. It is estimated that between 1830 and the onset of the Civil War a minimum of 100,000 slaves ran away, many to Canada and others to Mexico and various Caribbean islands. This total does not include countless others who ran away prior to 1830, a fact attested to by the first Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1793. Had there been no fugitive “problem,” there would have been no such legislation. Furthermore, such land-based activity was mirrored by its equivalent on the high seas or coastal trade. The Amistad and Creole cases are only the most famous of many mutinies and seizures of vessels by enslaved persons either being transported or working on ships’ crews.

Such assertions were stunning to me, having about them the “ring of truth” that resounds when missing pieces of a historical puzzle fit into place. One item, however, leapt off the pages to grab my attention and ultimately launch this project.

Amidst all the dates and names, the numbers and incidents, were the lyrics to a song. These lyrics, according to Aptheker, had been composed and sung by enslaved persons at a clandestine meeting to plan an insurrection in 1813. Aptheker presented the last stanza of this song:

Arise! Arise! shake off your chains!

Your cause is just, so Heaven ordains;

To you shall freedom be proclaimed!

Raise your arms and bare your breasts,

Almighty God will do the rest,

Blow the clarion’s warlike blast;

Call every Negro from his task;

Wrest the scourge from Buckra’s hand,

And drive each tyrant from the land!

Chorus: Firm, united let us be,

Resolved on death or liberty!

As a band of patriots joined,

Peace and plenty we shall find.

Anyone familiar with that great body of music known as the “Negro spirituals” will share my surprise at reading this text. This is not coded speech. Nor is it religious. Indeed, it is explicitly revolutionary and in a literary form that can only be described as sophisticated. I grew up singing “Go Down, Moses,” “Deep River,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and numerous other songs whose beauty is unrivalled in melodic and poetic power. But I had never before heard a song, composed by a slave in 1813 no less, that read like this one.

My first reaction was to question the song’s veracity. Could this be an example of the exaggerations Aptheker has been accused of? Could this be wishful thinking on the part of a well-intentioned scholar who nonetheless was reinterpreting or even manipulating the facts to give a false impression? Because, if this song was indeed what Aptheker claimed it to be, then a major gap in our knowledge, of music as well as history, was revealed. This text, from this period, immediately posed questions that demanded answers. Might there be more such songs? And if there were, why had they not been found and brought to public attention by now? If, moreover, there were more such songs and they had not been hitherto brought to light, then by whom and for what reasons had they been overlooked if not deliberately buried?

I started out assuming my own ignorance, expecting to find the answers neatly arranged by historians, musicologists, or song collectors. I figured this little pamphlet from 1939 had long ago been superseded by generations of diligent scholarship, and I was simply unaware that such scholarship existed.

What I discovered came as a surprise. Indeed, what unfolded was a series of surprises eventually leading to a conclusion greater than I originally imagined.

THE SEARCH BEGINS

For the first two years of my search, I kept expecting to discover that someone, somewhere had already found what I was looking for. I kept expecting some historian of music or ethnomusicologist to have made the connection between slave revolts and their musical expression. After all, the subject of African American music is so widely studied and of such interest to so many people that it seemed impossible no one had asked the questions I had. Eventually, I did find others who preceded me, contributing mightily to my effort. But their fate helps explain why and how these songs remained obscure. We’ll return to that subject later on.

At first, all I wanted to do was either to quickly solve the mystery or to justify further inquiry. I began calling friends and acquaintances in folklore studies and musicology. None had even heard of Aptheker’s pamphlet, let alone the song presented in it. More significantly, the question itself seemed baffling. If this song is authentic, it’s an anomaly. If an anomaly, then it suggests that other songs of this type were never written. When I pressed the question “But if there were slave revolts, isn’t it more likely there were songs related to them than that there were not?,” the answers became more ambivalent. Such a hypothesis might bear further scrutiny, but it seemed to never before have arisen.

Next, I consulted the record assembled by those scholars devoted to the legacy of African American song, dance, and story—in particular, the outstanding work of musicologist Eileen Southern. I located the authoritative African-American Tradition in Song, Sermon, Tale, and Dance, 1600s–1920: An Annotated Bibliography of Literature, Collections, and Artworks compiled by Southern and Josephine Wright. A dear friend purchased a copy of this expensive book, and I began to search its detailed registry for songs like the one in Aptheker’s pamphlet and where they might be found. I soon realized that I would have to search through many song collections and other reference books since the Southern-Wright bibliography lists only title and first lyrical lines. To view the complete texts would mean finding the sources listed. The songs were scattered throughout hundreds of songbooks, histories, articles, and essays by diverse authors over several centuries. The Library of Congress might be the only place I could see them all.

This daunting task might have stopped me but for the fact that in this comprehensive bibliography there was a strange omission: the song in Aptheker’s pamphlet. It was nowhere to be found. I was intrigued and pondered why such conscientious scholars as Southern and Wright might have missed this important text. Shortly thereafter, other discoveries came to my attention suggesting possible explanations.

First, I happened upon a story about a young graduate student who, in 2013, uncovered a poem, published in 1786 and written by an enslaved man named Jupiter Hammon, called “Essay on Slavery.”² Hammon, the first published African American poet (beginning in 1761), was long considered an apologist for slavery. But this hitherto unknown poem raised two questions, the first being that Hammon was far more critical of slavery than had previously been thought. The second was less the content of the poem than the fact that it lay hidden until very recently. Perhaps there were more such texts to be unearthed. Taken together, these two points raised yet another: the literacy of slaves, the poetry they wrote (whether it was to be sung or not), and the possibility that perhaps the reason songs such as the one Aptheker presented were not well known was that they were only available in printed form. Might the fact that folklorists and song collectors focused on oral traditions—what people sang as opposed to what was written down—explain why our existing song collections were incomplete?

No sooner had I learned of the discovery of Hammon’s poem than I read of a similar discovery that had even greater significance. Another graduate student had, in 2007, uncovered a record kept by Sydney Howard Gay, an operative on the Underground Railroad.³ Gay’s meticulous accounts show the real workings and full extent of an institution that was more legendary than established by historical fact. Historian Eric Foner immediately grasped that this new evidence called for a reappraisal, and his Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (2015) was the result. I wrote to Foner, who graciously answered my questions and confirmed that there were very likely more such documents and that it might never occur to a folklorist or musicologist to look for them. Generally speaking, historians rely on written records, while folklorists and ethnomusicologists focus more on oral accounts, whether spoken or sung. With this distinction in mind, I decided to examine what had been collected to date.

Using the Southern-Wright bibliography as a guide, I began consulting those collections that were best known, starting with Slave Songs of the United States, edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison and published in 1867, the same year as Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s collection. Higginson’s was among the first efforts to record what slaves composed and sang themselves, for each other and not for their masters’ entertainment. His Army Life in a Black Regiment included a chapter entitled “Negro Spirituals” with thirty-six complete songs and a couple of fragments. Higginson also wrote down commentary provided by the soldiers about the songs and how they were composed. There were several crucial pieces of evidence and one particular song that provided support for what was becoming my working hypothesis: there were more songs such as the one Aptheker had presented, but they were not going to be easy to find.

Slave Songs of the United States presented 136 songs, among which were variations of those Higginson had compiled. The great majority fit the mold to which we are accustomed. Many have long since become famous either as “Negro spirituals” or spirituals sung in various Protestant churches (regardless of ethnicity). One, however, stood out. It was a variation of a song in Higginson’s collection; indeed, we ended up recording a composite of the two versions set to the music in Slave Songs of the United States. The song is “My Father, How Long?” Beneath the tablature and lyric is a note from Higginson: “For singing this the negroes had been put in jail at Georgetown, S.C., at the outbreak of the Rebellion [as the Civil War was called at the time]. ‘We’ll soon be free’ was too dangerous an assertion, and though the chant was an old one, it was no doubt sung with redoubled emphasis during the new events.”⁴ (See the song notes later in this volume for more about this illuminating example.)

I next consulted other famous collections including those by John Wesley Work Jr., John W. Work III, Miles Mark Fisher, James Weldon Johnson, and J. Rosamond Johnson, as well as the collections of Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, and John Lomax. I consulted the major studies done by Henry Krehbiel and Dena J. Epstein. All told, I read several hundred distinct songs, some of which are famous and often quoted. Those frequently referred to in movies, plays, novels, and histories include “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “Steal Away,” “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Eyes on the Prize (Hand on the Plow),” “Wade in the Water,” and “Mary, Don’t You Weep.” While a significant number have lyrics unmistakably encouraging flight or fortitude in the struggle, none were overt expressions of revolutionary intent. In fact, I still hadn’t found any mention of the song Aptheker quoted, let alone that it was authentic!

At this point, it became imperative to go to the Library of Congress for a closer look. With the invaluable assistance of Todd Harvey, folklife specialist at the American Folklife Center, I began combing through the vast archives. What I found fell into two distinct categories: songbooks or collections made during and after the Civil War, and sound recordings made in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the largest body of which were made under the auspices of the Federal Writers Project between 1936 and 1939. In addition, there were miscellaneous articles published in American Music Quarterly in the 1960s and 1970s that provided important historical details and an overview of scholarly disputes in the field.

The overall impression all this provided was that, on the one hand, there was great and enduring interest in the subject of slaves and their music, while, on the other hand, there was an unquestioned assumption guiding the collection of data—namely, that the slaves did not rebel. While some researchers and song collectors acknowledged that enslaved and formerly enslaved persons may have been unwilling to take a white researcher into their confidence and that it was undoubtedly the case that there was danger in expressing rebellious thoughts in any form, this challenge did not prevent these researchers from jumping to the conclusion that the evidence they were presenting was the full extent of what existed.

I suddenly faced the realization that the very questions I was posing challenged this conclusion. I had started out naively unaware that what I had stumbled upon was so strikingly at odds with conventional wisdom, but there was now no escaping the implications. In short, what we have come to view as the music of African Americans in the United States is woefully incomplete and inadequately, indeed inappropriately, organized into categories that do not reflect the musical or lyrical breadth of the African American experience. More specifically, songs containing explicit reference to freedom, militant resistance, and organized opposition to the slave system were summarily dismissed as anomalous or nonexistent. Yet, that conclusion was refuted by two examples I uncovered at the Library of Congress itself demonstrating that such songs did exist. They furthermore supported the hypothesis that I was now determined to prove or disprove as the evidence mounted.

RECOGNITION MARCH AND SLAVERY DAYS

The first example is a piece of sheet music written by Francis Johnson. Its title attracted my attention when I saw it listed in a catalogue: “Recognition March of the Independance [sic] of Hayti.” The piece was written for piano forte and flute. It was dedicated to the president of Haiti, J. P. Boyer, which means it could not have been written before 1820 but probably was written precisely then, when Boyer became president of Haiti. I photocopied the music and began to study it.

Several features of the piece and its author were revelatory. First, it was clearly a march typical of the period using classical European instruments. Second, it provided for a Kent bugle solo, an instrument Francis Johnson was widely renowned for playing. Third, Johnson was a free Black man and one of the most popular band leaders of his era. His fame was so great that he had been invited to lead his band at the ceremony welcoming Marquis de Lafayette, legendary Revolutionary War hero, on his triumphal return to Washington, DC, in 1824.

The second example I uncovered at the Library of Congress was a song recorded by the Federal Writers Project called “Agonizing, Cruel Slavery Days.” The man performing the song was ninety-three years old at the time. I would find out more about him later. But there was enough in the notes about the song and its lyrics to indicate that it was composed by former slaves, was popular among them, and expressed their abhorrence of a system of bondage that they’d managed to outlive. Musically, it bore no resemblance to blues, work songs, or spirituals. If anything, it resembled show tunes popularized by traveling theater troupes in the post-Civil War era.

These two pieces of music puncture several deep-seated myths about slavery, music made in the United States, and, ultimately, the role that slave resistance, up to and through the Civil War, played in abolishing that system. The mere fact that a popular band leader and free man of color would use a European-derived musical form to celebrate the independence of Haiti does not fit prevalent images, even those purporting to be sympathetic with the cause of the enslaved. Yet here is music inspired by the first successful slave revolt in history, presented at a time when the United States still refused Haiti recognition.

And when, after the Civil War, a song is composed by former slaves unequivocally denouncing that condition as agonizing and cruel, it is irrefutable evidence that such feeling was common among them and therefore likely to have been expressed in more than one song.

PREDECESSORS

At this juncture I came upon two more books that contained not only supporting argument but more songs of the type I was looking for. First was a book published in 1953 called American Folksongs of Protest. Its author, John Greenway, had obviously done the kind of digging I was now doing and had discovered two songs collected by Lawrence Gellert in the late 1920s or early 1930s. One was called “Uncle Gabriel,” which was about Gabriel Prosser, leader of an aborted slave revolt in 1800. The other was “Nat Turner,” celebrating the leader of perhaps the most famous slave revolt in U.S. history, which took place in 1831. In addition, Greenway presented two other songs, “The Year of Jubalo” and “Ol’ Massa, He Come Dancin’ Out,” that were clearly composed during the Civil War. Greenway had found these songs in the archives of the Federal Writers Project, manuscripts I would later consult myself.

The second book was a short one entitled The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States, edited by Bernard Katz and published in 1969. As stated in its introduction, “The pages that follow contain pioneering writings on the early history of Afro-American music. Never before have they been gathered together for the easy access of the general reader or the research of the musicologist and the historian.”⁵ In this book were many slave songs, most of which fit the familiar mold. But one stood out from all the rest. “The Dirge of St. Malo” was a fragment of a ballad composed in Louisiana Creole and collected by George Washington Cable. Cable had published this song along with its English translation in The Century Magazine in 1886. Jean St. Malo was the leader of a band of maroons (runaway slaves) in then Spanish-ruled Louisiana. St. Malo was not only an effective leader; he was a symbol inspiring slave resistance, which required an expeditionary force to suppress. St. Malo was ultimately captured and was hanged in New Orleans in 1784.

Also in The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States was an essay by John Lovell Jr. titled “The Social Implications of the Negro Spiritual.” This essay, first published in 1939, challenged ruling dogma concerning interpretation of the spirituals and did so while quoting from the very Aptheker pamphlet, published the same year, that had started me on my quest. If nothing else, Lovell’s essay showed that Aptheker’s original thesis was in circulation at the time and was not unknown to his contemporaries.

Perhaps more significant was Lovell’s contention that three characteristics of the spirituals identified them as revolutionary: “first, the Negro’s obsession with freedom”; “Second was the slave’s desire for justice”; and finally, “the slave song was an awesome prophecy,” fulfilled in slave revolts and ultimately the Civil War.⁶ That such an assertion would challenge notions held by a white-supremacist establishment is no surprise. But Lovell’s criticism extended even to those great champions of emancipation and social justice W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and James Weldon Johnson, whose interpretation of spirituals as “impassioned and beautiful” was, to Lovell, “sentimentalism, still.”⁷ We have only to recall Du Bois’s famous characterization of the “Negro spirituals” as “sorrow songs”⁸ to grasp the import of Lovell’s claim.

It was on the strength of this essay that I sought out Lovell’s book-length treatment of the theme: Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. This magisterial study, published in 1972, is clearly the culmination of work Lovell had undertaken back in 1939. One point was especially compelling. Lovell claimed there are six thousand spirituals that to one degree or another express exactly those thoughts and feelings that fit my criteria—that is, songs composed by slaves explicitly calling for freedom and collective resistance to slavery. This large number is not as surprising as it may first appear given the almost four-century duration of slavery in North America. More puzzling is the fact that Lovell’s argument had not been followed to its logical conclusion and the record set straight simply by presenting the evidence.

Lovell’s work was certainly encouraging, but more than that, I found in his book the text to “The Negro’s Complaint” composed in 1820 by fugitive slave-turned-Methodist minister Thomas Cooper and set to the tune of “Old Hundred,” among the best known of all Christian hymns. I now had nine slave songs and the certainty that there were more. The questions raised by these discoveries were becoming more urgent as well.

THE ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT

I returned to Eric Foner and posed these questions in light of what I’d found. He directed me to The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition by Manisha Sinha and Amazing Grace by James Basker. These two books were published in 2016 and 2002, respectively, and indicate how historiography has advanced since the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. In brief, The Slave’s Cause is a monumental study of the long struggle to abolish slavery, while Amazing Grace is a compendium of poetry about slavery spanning the years 1660 to 1810. The authors of both books were kind enough to answer my questions and provide valuable leads to more songs. While confirming that distinctions between academic disciplines were a factor contributing to songs’ being lost or unaccounted for, both said there was more to it than that.

Basker’s excavation of more than four hundred poems by more than 250 poets published between the time England became fully involved in the slave trade and its eventual prohibition is a landmark study in more ways than one. Included within his book are poems by people from England, North America, and the Caribbean, slave and free, men and women. The poets range from anonymous to world-renowned. Virtually all are united in their determination to abolish slavery. They push back the date of antislavery writing to well before what most Americans are familiar with: the antebellum period between 1807 and the Civil War. They furthermore demonstrate that enslaved people themselves were writing and being published—in the case of former slave Olaudah Equiano, a bestselling autobiography.⁹

Yet Basker’s volume was the first such compilation of its kind. In it, Basker notes that it “documents in massive detail the degree to which poets were the most outspoken and persistent critics of slavery, and fostered massive changes in public perception and attitude.” He goes on to describe how in the intervening centuries various theories have been advanced claiming “English literature was ‘complicitous in Empire’ that the majority of writers supported and condoned the goals and practices of the ’imperial project’ including its worst features such as the slave trade and plantation slavery.” Today, however, “The question for us is, how could theories that are so far at odds with the historical evidence have flourished in the first place?”¹⁰

Sinha’s work documents the vast scale and complexity of the international movement to abolish slavery, providing a much-needed antidote to certain falsehoods that stubbornly cling to the popular imagination. To this day, many people think that abolitionists were bourgeois do-gooders whose objection to slavery was that it disturbed their delicate sensibilities. These privileged northerners were responsible for a needless conflict, the Civil War, without which slavery would have eventually disappeared of its own accord. Sinha demonstrates not only the falsehood of such notions but what such notions were concocted to conceal.

Abolitionism as a movement began in the mid-eighteenth century and developed over the course of two great waves: the revolutionary period (1760–1820), and in 1830–1865. It was, furthermore, an international movement on four continents—Africa, Europe, and North and South America—involving hundreds of thousands of active participants and, necessarily, producing a great deal of literature, much of which still exists. It was Sinha’s great achievement that convinced me how important it was to have, along with the slave songs, a representative sampling of abolitionist songs. Besides, Sinha informed me of the work of Joshua McCarter Simpson, which would become a crucial source in this collection.

Both these scholars pointed out patterns of historical revision and theoretical obfuscation that helped me understand the difficulties I’d encountered in my search. Naturally, this applied not only to texts but to music as well. The terrain shifts when you move from English literature to popular music. This was evident in the process of gathering representative abolitionist songs.

A MUSICAL BATTLEGROUND

Two songbooks became cornerstones of my presentation of abolitionist songs in this book. The first, published in 1848 by a fugitive slave named William Wells Brown, is entitled The Anti-Slavery Harp. I found it on my visit to the Library of Congress. The second, The Emancipation Car, was first published in 1854 and was the composition of Joshua McCarter Simpson, a free Black man who became an abolitionist after attending Oberlin College. This book was preceded by Simpson’s Original Anti-Slavery Songs in 1852.¹¹ Together, these books convey the militancy and intelligence guiding a multifaceted and multi-ethnic movement. While a few abolitionist songs survive in the canon of American music, they are not remembered as such, nor is their connection to the more than five hundred songs of this type still available. “Amazing Grace” and “Darling Nelly Gray” are two famous examples still performed today, but who knows they were written by abolitionists?

In addition to the rich textual material contained in these songs, the music to which they were set sheds light on what was popular in the United States prior to the Civil War, and this, too, challenges many common misconceptions. There were stirring revolutionary anthems such as the French Revolution’s “The Marseillaise” and the Scottish rebel ballad “Scots Wha Hae,” as well as parodies of patriotic songs such as “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” But there were also numerous minstrel songs, well known at the time to be mockeries of African American speech, dance, and music. The history of blackface and the minstrel show is too big a subject to be addressed in this chapter, but suffice it to say that Joshua McCarter Simpson commented on his own use of such songs in the introduction to his Original Anti-Slavery Songs (1852), writing:

In offering my first little production to the public, I am well aware that many superstitious, prejudiced, and perhaps many good, conscientious, well-meaning christians [sic] will have serious objections to the “Airs” to which my poetry is set. My object in my selection of tunes, is to kill the degrading influence of these comic Negro Songs, which are too common among our people, and change the flow of these sweet melodies into more appropriate and useful channels.¹²

Simpson’s statement is of greater import than it might first appear to be. How he selected music for his lyrics and the controversy that selection aroused shed light on the forces at work, then and ever since, to suppress or erase, first, the overtly revolutionary slave songs and, secondly, the large number of abolitionist songs.

“Comic Negro songs,” as they were called, were indeed widely popular, and many recent studies have been devoted to the blackface minstrel phenomenon. With a few notable exceptions, these studies overlook a great many other forms popular music took at the time, and few discuss the work of abolitionists such as Simpson.¹³ Moreover, most ignore the fact that there were musicians of international renown who were dedicated abolitionists—the outstanding example being the Hutchinson Family Singers. This group was, in fact, the most popular group in America between 1845 and the Civil War. Many years later, Frederick Douglass wrote of the Hutchinsons:

their fine talent for music could have secured for them wealth and fame; but, like Moses, they preferred to suffer affliction in the cause of justice and liberty than to enjoy the fruits of a concession to slavery…. I saw this family in all the vicissitudes of its career…. I saw it in times that tried men’s souls. I saw it in peace and I saw it in war; but I never saw any one of its members falter or flinch before any duty, whether social or patriotic; and it is a source of more satisfaction than I can express, to have lived, as I have now done, to bear this high testimony to the character of the Hutchinsons.¹⁴

Also missing in past accounts, whether written by historians or folklorists, is the role of the music industry, which was formed during the very period Sinha defined as abolition’s second wave. Recall that “Jump Jim Crow” was first performed in 1828. The commercial success of this performance was quickly grasped by publishers of sheet music and promoters of traveling shows, becoming within a few years a highly profitable business. Indeed, blackface minstrelsy was a cornerstone upon which the music industry in the United States was built. The culpability of that industry in the propagation of racism and exploitation of Black musicians is beyond doubt. From “Jump Jim Crow” to the film The Jazz Singer (1927) one hundred years later, great wealth was generated for corporations that have yet to be held accountable. Is it surprising then that there would be little interest in discovering songs that attacked their premises from the outset?

In a blistering rejoinder to an editorial condemning the Hutchinsons as “poor performers” whose “popularity was on the wane” because their “abolitionism had ruined them,” Frederick Douglass took its author to task:

We believe he does not object to the “Virginia Minstrels,” “Christy’s Minstrels,” the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” or any of the filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow-citizens. Those performers are undoubtedly in harmony with his refined and elegant taste! Then those beautiful and highly sentimental songs which they sing, such as “Ole Zip Coon,” “Jim Crow,” “Ole Dan Tucker,” “Jim along Josey,” and a few other of such specimens of American musical genius, must spread over his spirit a charm, and awaken in his bosom a rapture only equalled by that celestial transport which thrills his noble heart on witnessing a TREMENDOUS SQUASH!¹⁵

With the songs from Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp and Simpson’s Emancipation Car, I had only to add selections brought to my attention by musician and historian Tim Eriksen, who leads a community singing group in Amherst, Massachusetts. This group sings from The Sacred Harp, a songbook written in shape-notes (as opposed to conventional musical notation), in a tradition with links to the abolitionist movement. Several of the songs I’d selected from The Anti-Slavery Harp were already in the group’s repertoire. This community-based singing and its expression of abolitionist themes present another challenge, musically and historically, to a prevailing image of what popular secular music in the United States consisted prior to the Civil War—that is, Stephen Foster, Dan Emmet, Christy’s Minstrels, on the one hand, and European stars like Jenny Lind, on the other.

The repertoire I’d assembled at this point was nearly complete. The goal I’d set was not to dig up every song that exists. Rather it was to present a representative sample big enough to make the case. Somewhat arbitrarily I set the number at fifteen slave and fifteen abolitionist songs. This total conforms to the conventional length of an album (CD or LP) and could be presented to the public as a concert or recording for the pleasure of listening and not only for the archivist or scholar.

THE LAWRENCE GELLERT STORY

One final piece of the puzzle remained to be found. Through all the twists and turns of my research, I had not been able to locate the song with which I began. The mystery was only solved through verifying and authenticating other songs.

Two songs presented in John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest were attributed to Lawrence Gellert. I had found Gellert referenced in other books about folk music. In fact, I recalled once having a record in my personal collection called Negro Songs of Protest, which comprised songs Gellert had recorded in the 1930s. But I knew very little about him, much less where these two songs, “Uncle Gabriel” and “Nat Turner,” had come from. I began scouring libraries and my own books and came across a few references. But none clearly and definitively corroborated the songs’ authenticity or their origins. I then stumbled upon the work of Steven Garabedian, especially his essay “Reds, Whites, and the Blues.”¹⁶

Garabedian’s essay gave detailed information about Gellert and the controversy surrounding his song collecting. According to Garabedian, Gellert had set out to find a type of song many authorities claimed did not exist. Gellert openly declared that he was not a folklorist, had no interest in folklore, and was only concerned with, and sympathetic to, the struggles Black people were waging at the time. Apparently, his search had begun in the early 1920s, but his work came to public attention in 1936 when Negro Songs of Protest was celebrated in publications as varied as the New York Times and the Marxist New Masses. For a few years, Gellert was lauded as having made an important contribution.

Yet despite this momentary acclaim, Negro Songs of Protest never attained the stature that one might expect. Unlike the work of other song collectors, especially Alan Lomax, Gellert’s collecting was consigned to oblivion. Selections from the original record were released as an LP in 1973, but by this time Gellert’s reputation had been damaged by accusations of fraud. It was asserted that Gellert had coached his informants, whom he refused to identify, eliciting from them lyrics they would never have otherwise sung, perhaps even writing them himself. Gellert, it was claimed, imposed his radical politics on unsophisticated people to make it appear the Black masses were revolutionary in outlook.

Since two songs Gellert had presented were among those I planned to use, it was imperative that I authenticate them or risk undermining the credibility of the entire project. I contacted Steven Garabedian, who told me that his own research not only confirmed the authenticity of Gellert’s findings; it revealed a great deal about the forces at work in the two distinct periods—the 1930s and 1960s—when folk music revivals focused attention on vernacular music in the United States, especially the music of African Americans. Similar to the obfuscation and dismissal that I found prevalent in the song collecting done mainly by white southerners after Reconstruction, later folklorists and aficionados of blues seemed unable to hear what Black people were singing.¹⁷ Why would anger and militancy directed at white supremacy and capitalist exploitation be surprising?

Nevertheless, Garabedian had laboriously studied all five hundred of Gellert’s recordings and could find no evidence of coaching or coaxing. Furthermore, a careful comparison of the lyrics Gellert collected with other Black songs revealed no discrepancies in dialect, vocabulary, or style. There was, in fact, no reason to doubt the authenticity of the “protest” songs in the first place. Instead, the bias of the critics—that is, the assumption that Black people had passively accepted their fate—was exposed.

In addition, Garabedian was able to furnish me with more details regarding the song “Nat Turner,” sharing with me interviews he’d conducted with Pete Seeger and others who were in no doubt about Gellert’s reliability (see song notes). It was at this point I posed my dilemma concerning the song I’d found in Aptheker’s pamphlet. Garabedian generously offered to use his academic access to archives to do a bit of digging.

THE HYMN OF FREEDOM

Within a few days I received an email containing Garabedian’s findings. He’d found not only all three verses of the song, but the music the lyrics were set to. Furthermore, the full story of the song’s composition, the circumstances in which it was performed and how it came to be written down were now available. They fully confirmed Aptheker’s claims and more (see song notes).

This fascinating story deserves a book-length treatment, but it is briefly told in the following entry from Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History (1905):

When [British] Admiral Cockburn began his marauding expedition on the American coast in the spring of 1813, he held out a promise of freedom to all slaves who should join his standard. Many were seduced on board his vessels, but found themselves wretchedly deceived. Intelligence of these movements reached the plantations farther south, and, in the summer of 1813, secret organizations were formed among the slaves to receive and co-operate with Cockburn’s army of liberation, as they supposed it to be. One of these secret organizations met regularly on St. Johns Island, near Charleston. Their leader was a man of great sagacity and influence, and their meetings were opened and closed by singing a hymn composed by that leader—a sort of parody of Hail Columbia.¹⁸

This account was itself based on the record kept by the slaveowner who’d witnessed the meeting. His story was recounted in correspondence between clergyman John Forsyth and a writer named Benson John Lossing. Forsyth named the song the “Negro Hymn of Freedom” and followed the complete text with the words: “I think you will agree with me that the above is no mean addition to Negro Literature.”¹⁹ John Hammond Moore of Winthrop College in South Carolina gathered this correspondence together, mentioning as well that the story bore a striking resemblance to one told by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child in her Freedmen’s Book (1865). Moore’s article was published in the Journal of Negro History in 1965.

The discrepancy between Aptheker’s publication in 1939 and Moore’s publication in 1965 is explained by the fact that Aptheker used Lossing’s recounting of the tale (including lyrics) in Lossing’s 1868 book, A Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812. Evidently, this is where Aptheker originally discovered the story and the song.

My last step was comparing “Hail Columbia” to the “Hymn of Freedom.” It turns out that “Hail Columbia” was the national anthem of the United States at the time of the War of 1812. Obviously, such an anthem would, in time of war, have been performed widely and often. This explains why slaves would have heard the song, and it would form the basis for a parody of sorts. And, indeed, the words to “Hymn of Freedom” fit the music perfectly.

With this accomplished, I was ready to gather all the materials, musical and lyrical, and proceed to recording them for presentation to the world at large. The evidence presented by the fifteen slave songs I’d uncovered augmented by the fifteen abolitionist songs I’d chosen was conclusive.

From the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade to the Civil War, enslaved people resisted in diverse ways including armed rebellion. Resistance was furthermore expressed in poetic and musical form, not only to strengthen resolve and prepare for battle but to win support for the abolition of slavery. Attempts to rewrite this history began immediately after Reconstruction. They included burying the evidence and replacing it with a fictitious narrative that justified the renewed subjugation of people who’d been nominally emancipated. This effort greatly expanded in the early years of the twentieth century with films such as Birth of a Nation, novels such as Gone with the Wind, and the promulgation of the “Lost Cause” narrative of a glorious southern civilization destroyed by northern invaders. This blatant distortion was accompanied by a more nuanced and apparently sympathetic portrayal of Black people and their music. An edifice was erected that did include the “Negro spiritual” along with blues and jazz. Yet even the most laudatory exaltation of Black musical achievement was simultaneously erasing an entire category of expression.

It is my hope that the evidence presented by these songs will convince readers that a great wrong has been done and can now be put right. It is furthermore necessary to expand this field of research to include all the countries affected, including especially the Caribbean, Brazil, and other Latin American countries. What young people can learn about music and history is of incalculable importance. Their future will be better for reclaiming the past.