History, Geography, Language, and Music

FINDING SONGS AND VERIFYING THEIR AUTHENTICITY RAISED QUESTIONS that required I look beyond the formal boundaries of folklore or cultural studies into other fields. These other fields can be roughly categorized as history, geography, and linguistics. In addition, the work of certain individuals had to be more fully explored not only to give credit where it’s due but to aid further exploration of what they pioneered.

Historically, slavery is a vast subject, international in scope and predating the Atlantic slave trade with which this book is concerned. Even within the confines of the Atlantic slave trade, the evolution of a system took different forms in different regions within the Western Hemisphere, conquered at one time or another by various European powers. In North America, the evolution of the slave system was not one straight line but followed a torturous course (literally and figuratively). Different means at different times were employed to ensure the security of the slave system. At one point, for example, it was thought necessary and beneficial to educate slaves in order that they become good Christians. At least, they should be taught the Bible and Christian hymns.

This is among the reasons that well before the American Revolution there were literate and highly articulate people who, though enslaved, were able to write poetry and essays, some of which clearly denounced the system of slavery. It also explains the use of music popularized by Protestant denominations to accompany texts written to combat the lies and slanders used to justify that system. Only when it became apparent that slaves and free Black people were using the story of Exodus and the biblical prohibition of manstealing to rally support for their cause did the slaveowners change tack. The event that signifies and to a large extent caused this change was, of course, Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831.

Subsequently, two contradictory trends emerged. The first was brutal suppression of literacy, public gatherings, and even Christian education of enslaved people in most of the South. The second was the rapid growth of the abolitionist movement, the Underground Railroad, and international opposition to slavery. On August 1, 1833, slavery was abolished in the British Commonwealth, a date celebrated to this day in Jamaica. It took thirty more years of intense struggle for the Emancipation Proclamation to be issued in the United States.

LANGUAGE

Another dimension of this history is linguistic. Almost all the songs I found are in English. “The Dirge of St. Malo” and “Rebeldia na Bandabou” are the exceptions. “The Dirge of St. Malo” was sung in Louisiana Creole. “Rebeldia na Bandabou” was sung in Papiamentu, the language enslaved people spoke in Curaçao (Papiamentu remains an official language in Curaçao). I devoted considerable effort to locating songs from the Caribbean and Louisiana, especially in French or Creole. I consulted several experts on the Haitian Revolution and Louisiana including Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and David Geggus. I read Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century and Geggus’s The Haitian Revolution, both of which make reference to slave singing and link that singing directly to resistance; but, with the exception of the “Dirge of St. Malo,” they do not present actual songs. When I wrote to Hall and Geggus, both kindly responded and said there is plenty of evidence that such songs existed but, alas, they were not written down.¹

Nonetheless, the two songs I found are indicative of a type of song that we should expect and not be surprised to find. Why? Throughout the world, in many cultures, ballads, dances, stories, and graphic imagery conveying battles, uprisings, heroes, and visions of freedom abound. There is no reason to expect enslaved Africans or their descendants born in the Western Hemisphere to be any different, especially given the central role music played in the lives of the enslaved. The two songs I did locate are representative and not anomalous. They are characteristic of balladry and commemoration common to a type of song through which the history of oppressed people is preserved and passed down. The reasons we have so few examples at present are therefore important to explore.

One reason is obvious: suppression. That at certain times and places, drumming was forbidden is a well-established fact. Should it be surprising that songs celebrating rebellion would be suppressed as well? It was nonetheless commonly reported that slaves gathering in insurrections or caught planning one were also observed singing. Here, it is not so much suppression as incomprehension that explains the apparent lack.

A perfect example is the Stono Rebellion, which took place in South Carolina in 1739.² Eyewitnesses described the slaves marching down the road, beating drums, and carrying a banner that read “Libertad.” They were reported to have been singing at many points along the march route, which was in the direction of Florida where the Spanish had promised freedom to those escaping slavery. Evidently, the leaders were recent captives from the Kingdom of the Congo and were likely to be speaking and perhaps singing in Portuguese. In any case, the witnesses recording the events could not understand them; hence, we don’t know what words the rebels sang.

On the other side of the linguistic question is why there are so many songs in English. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the many peculiar features of slavery in North America, but a few points can be made. By 1660, the slave system was on a firm enough basis there to make the English, latecomers to the slave trade, more than interested. Indeed, at this point the English sought to overtake their competitors—the Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese—in what was an increasingly profitable venture. As James Basker explains:

Between 1672 and 1713 the Royal African Company sent five hundred ships to Africa which, in addition to other trade, carried away 125,000 slaves for transatlantic sale. By 1730, Britain (as it was called after the Union with Scotland in 1707) had become the world’s leading slavetrading nation, and would occupy that position until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. And it wasn’t just as cargo that slaves were entering British consciousness. Beginning in the 1730s, articles about slave insurrections appeared regularly in London periodicals: a total of 52 articles about 43 different insurrections, for example, were published in the Gentleman’s Magazine between the late 1730s and the eve of the American Revolution.³

Such reports were followed almost immediately by the first denunciations of the evils of man-stealing. From this point forward, growth in the English slave trade was mirrored by opposition to it that had no equal in size or influence in the other imperial powers (an exception being the French revolutionary period when a great proliferation of abolitionist texts appeared in France such as those of Fr. Henri Gregoire). There were, moreover, relatively large numbers of religious dissenters who migrated to North America and who, to one degree or another, consciously opposed slavery. Quakers, Methodists, and Baptists were especially vocal. In the early period, the Methodists and Baptists were among the most active in the education of slaves, and there are numerous examples not only of their proselytizing but of their training Black people as ministers.

Three outstanding examples are Richard Allen of Philadelphia; Thomas Cooper, who preached not only in the United States but in London and Africa as well; and Shadrack Bassett of Maryland. Allen was the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Philadelphia in 1794 and produced a hymnal, A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors by Richard Allen, African Minister in 1801. In 1816, the AME became the first independent Black denomination in the United States with congregations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Allen’s example and leadership soon inspired others.

The Reverend Thomas Cooper was a fugitive slave who, in 1820, produced The African Pilgrim’s Hymns, comprised of 372 hymns he either composed or collected. According to John Lovell, Cooper’s hymns are “reminiscent of the most radical of the spirituals.”⁴ He made the collection for the use of congregations in London and Africa where he also preached. It was Cooper who wrote the text “The Negro’s Complaint” to the tune of “The Old Hundred,” included in this book.

The Reverend Shadrack Bassett was sent by his Maryland congregation of the AME Church to preach in Virginia. There is evidence that his preaching is what inspired Nat Turner. Apparently due to his emancipatory interpretation of the biblical narrative, Bassett was barred from preaching by the authorities. But not before he’d composed “The African Hymn,” which, records show, was sung in the region of Turner’s activities and is also included here (see song notes in chapter 3).

Another contributing factor was the revolutionary agitation that led up to the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. To a great extent, this agitation was directed at a populace capable of reading or at least understanding what was written down, as reflected in the tenor and tone of many extant poems and essays written by enslaved, fugitive, and free Black people in both England and America. Moreover, the revolutionary period is marked by a shift in emphasis from moral argument based on Christian teachings to political argument based on concepts of liberty and justice.

Eileen Southern notes that, in 1775, “The Dunmore Proclamation, promising freedom to all slaves who joined the British Army, caused liberalizing of colonial laws that prohibited the enlistment of Negroes as servicemen.”⁵ This was followed in 1778, according to Southern, by the “first enactment of laws offering freedom to slaves who should serve in the [Continental] army for a number of years.” By the time the first census was taken in the United States in 1790, “the black population was more than three quarters of a million, including 59,000 free blacks.”⁶ By 1860, there were approximately four million slaves and half a million free Black people,⁷ a great many of whom were active in the abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad.

The basic fact that slave revolts erupted from the beginning to the end of slavery led to a number of consequences. Had slaves not rebelled, there would have been no abolitionist movement. Without an abolitionist movement, there would have been no Civil War. This war might not have been won without the almost two hundred thousand slaves who joined the Union Army and Navy in fighting the Confederacy.⁸ Certain songs included in this collection bear witness to this often-overlooked aspect of history. The triumph of the enslaved and their supporters was the abolition of slavery.

The betrayal of the promise of post-Civil War Reconstruction is most responsible for the burial of this history and this music. Until the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s began to undo the damage, the old planters and their capitalist brethren in the North were successful enough in propagating their self-serving version of history that, even as resistance continued, they would leave a pile of debris through which subsequent generations have had to dig.

OVERCOMING THE OBSTACLES

The diversity of sources and their diffusion through many libraries and archives are no doubt key elements in the difficulties of recovering material. But as several of my colleagues pointed out, much of what I discovered was, as the saying goes, hiding in plain sight. All my sources were previously published. All were available in one library or another and in most cases had been for some time. This raises a final point that should be considered in evaluating the results of this inquiry.

My criteria, established at the beginning, were based largely on the first song I found, “Hymn of Freedom.” I was looking for songs composed by slaves containing lyrics explicitly invoking liberty and justice, advocating collective resistance, and unequivocally demanding, not beseeching. The celebration of heroes such as Nat Turner is another form of the same advocacy. So, too, are those songs that are only slightly coded, such as “Children, We All Shall Be Free,” wherein “the Lord” is a veiled reference to the Yankees, as attested to by a young drummer interviewed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, as reported in his Army Life in a Black Regiment. Furthermore, other versions of certain songs, such as “March On,” even dispense with the code and are more explicit than the version I recorded (see song notes in chapter 3).

To a certain extent, the boundary between slave and abolitionist songs is blurred since some abolitionist songs were composed by slaves and one of the slave songs (“Recognition March of the Independance of Hayti”) was composed by a free Black man. Yet the latter is a clear reference to the greatest slave revolt of all—and the only one to succeed, leading to an independent state. The categories are not hard and fast in any case, but they serve the purpose of establishing their common foundation among the enslaved population itself while at the same time bringing to light the breadth of support for the cause of emancipation. Taken as a whole, the repertoire covers a range, musically and lyrically, that at the very least enhances understanding of slave songs, Black music more generally, and the complex interplay over centuries between diverse influences originating in Europe, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere.

Hopefully, this book will lead to a reappraisal of this music and how it is commonly transmitted and used. Many of the disputes I learned of concerned the origins of the music slaves used to express themselves. To a large extent, such disputes involved efforts to reinforce racist stereotypes and had no basis in the facts, musical or otherwise. Two extremes were proposed: everything Black people sang they learned from the white man; or, conversely, everything they sang came from Africa or from some inbred talent. Examples of the former are found in the works of George Pullen Jackson, Newman I. White, and Guy B. Johnson, all of whom were taken to task by John Lovell in his Black Song: The Forge and the Flame. Lovell exposed the flawed methods and erroneous conclusions of studies these authors conducted, which purported to prove that the “Negro spiritual” is essentially a copy of the white spiritual. The implication was obvious: Black people were only capable of imitation, not creativity. At the other pole of misapprehension lay the image of the “happy slave,” singing and dancing as natural and carefree as a child. This image was promoted widely by defenders of the slave system and decried by abolitionists, most famously Frederick Douglass, who in his autobiography specifically targeted this view of slaves and their music. Debunking this image was further complicated, however, by blackface minstrelsy, as Dena Epstein explains, “Adding to their [the abolitionists’] dilemma was the emergence of the minstrel theater, with its increasingly offensive portrayal of plantation slaves as mindless buffoons who spent their time singing and dancing on the old plantation.”⁹

This dichotomy, moreover, ostensibly concerned with music, in fact expressed an attitude toward the enslaved and their descendants designed to keep Black people “in their place.” Such attitudes were succinctly summarized by W. E. B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction: “Everything Negroes did was wrong. If they fought for freedom, they were beasts; if they did not fight, they were born slaves. If they cowered on the plantation, they loved slavery; if they ran away, they were lazy loafers. If they sang, they were silly; if they scowled, they were impudent…. And they were funny, funny—ridiculous baboons, aping men.”¹⁰

Many defenders of the humanity of Black people necessarily reacted to these slanders and distortions by asserting the opposite—that is, the opposite of whichever skewed perspective was being advanced by defenders of the status quo. But this duality has often led to further confusion.

The truth is both more obvious and more interesting. Over centuries, enslaved people preserved certain practices handed down from their African ancestry while incorporating music derived from various European and Native American sources. They also created utterly novel forms that appeared nowhere else but in the United States. Furthermore, interchange among Black, white, Native, and Hispanic musicians was continuous and fluid, defying racial or ethnic characterization of any kind.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Certain sources were of such significance to this project that they require further comment. In some cases, sources can be described as seminal or so widely referred to that they are indispensable: for example, Allen, Ware, and Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States. Others are less widely known but are nonetheless indispensable. Three notable examples are The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs by J. B. T. Marsh (1880), Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students (1901), and Folk Song of the American Negro (1915) by John Wesley Work Jr. Not only did these three books provide songs in my collection, but they are of considerable historical interest as well. All three are products of Reconstruction and the struggle that ensued following its tragic end in 1877. All three are based on or include the work of African American scholars connected with institutions (Fisk University and Hampton Institute) originally established to educate newly freed people. All three predate the much better-known studies that followed, but which were produced by scholars credentialed or recognized as authorities by elite, predominantly white institutions. On the one hand, Slave Songs of the United States, made in the heat of victory in the Civil War and popularized widely soon after, could be considered the authoritative text to be ignored by no one. But the other books were published in the wake of the defeat of Reconstruction, by Black institutions struggling to survive as the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers attests. (Briefly, it was to raise desperately needed funds that the Fisk singers went on tour. This tour was not only successful financially and musically, bringing world renown to the group, but it was responsible for the popularization of the “Negro spiritual” as a musical form, distinct from secular songs or even “folk songs.” The training and refinement displayed by the singers clearly distinguished them from rural, uneducated plantation laborers. This image helped combat the degrading image conveyed by blackface minstrelsy, but it inadvertently aided the erecting of an artificial boundary, of which the music business is so fond, between ostensibly religious or “serious” music fit for urban bourgeois audiences and other types of songs. Designating genres suits marketing, but it obscures the complex interplay of influences present in most music, especially music originating among the common people. See song notes in chapters 3 and 4 for more.)

Another noteworthy source is Music and Some Highly Musical People. Written by James M. Trotter and published in 1878, this book, according to Eileen Southern and Josephine Wright, is a “landmark publication” and “the first survey of American music to be published in the United States.”¹¹ Trotter was born in slavery, escaped via the Underground Railway, and eventually fought in the Civil War, becoming the first African American to achieve the rank of Second Lieutenant in the Union Army. Though it provided no songs for my collection, Trotter’s book is nonetheless indispensable as it broadens the view of African American music from the early nineteenth century through Reconstruction. Francis Johnson, discussed by Trotter and in chapter 1 of this book, is only one example of the sophistication, musical skill, and wide acclaim attained by Black people, both free and enslaved, long before emancipation. Indeed, Trotter’s work complicates the whole conception that guided so many song collectors that Black music was limited to what field hands sang. Indeed, Trotter’s aim, according to Southern and Wright, was “to trace the footsteps of the remarkable colored musician wherever they might lead.”

In other cases, sources are lesser known or known only within a particular discipline. Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition, for example, is a vitally important work, well known among historians but not likely to be referred to by folklorists, musicologists, or the general public. In chapter 1, I described Sinha’s pathbreaking study charting the centuries-long struggle to abolish slavery, but I might never have found it had I confined my search to the fields of folklore or musicology. In still other cases, sources are marginal, viewed with skepticism or even discredited. In this latter category might fall, for example, the Aptheker pamphlet that inspired my project or the song collecting of Lawrence Gellert, both of which supplied songs I have endeavored to authenticate beyond reasonable doubt. In any case, certain sources bear closer scrutiny than that given up to this point.

To begin with the Aptheker pamphlet, Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860 (1939), I was aware of the controversy surrounding Aptheker’s scholarship. I knew Aptheker was a communist and had long been marginalized by the academy. While this clouded his reputation, it did not prove he was wrong about slave revolts or that the song he presented was inauthentic. It did, however, require that I remove any doubt by verifying Aptheker’s evidence and appraising the current status of his work. I started by asking a number of historians for their views.

Those most familiar with Aptheker were, as one might expect, those concerned with US history, slavery and its abolition, the Civil War, and the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Among those I consulted were Eric Foner, author of many books on related themes; Manisha Sinha, author of The Slave’s Cause; and Robin D. G. Kelley, who wrote the outstanding Hammer and Hoe as well as the introduction to this volume. I furthermore consulted African American History and Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker (1998), edited by Herbert Shapiro.¹² The general consensus was that Aptheker had indeed pioneered the study of slave revolts in the United States. None before him had systematically pursued the evidence because that evidence ran counter to prevailing opinion, which held that the slaves did not rebel. Or, if they occasionally had rebelled, it was neither often enough nor effective enough to be a factor in shaping government policy, the Civil War, or slavery’s abolition. The popular saying “Lincoln freed the slaves” so dominated public discourse that to consider enslaved people as conscious, active participants in their own emancipation was practically unthinkable.

Aptheker’s master’s thesis (1931) was on Nat Turner’s rebellion, followed in 1939 by the Negro Slave Revolts pamphlet, and then by his doctoral thesis, which was published as American Negro Slave Revolts in 1943. That book qualifies as both seminal and a classic. It remains in print and is widely read today. While it has certainly been augmented and built upon, it has not become outmoded. It furthermore amply demonstrates the depth of Aptheker’s research and data-gathering, the rigor of which none of his critics could dispute.¹³ This, again, was the consensus view of the historians I consulted.

I learned further that, in the ensuing decades, Aptheker’s conclusions, initially far outside the mainstream, are now generally accepted, various caveats and reservations notwithstanding. Though Aptheker himself remains a controversial figure, his scholarship is nonetheless reliable. It took me more than two years to find and verify the full text of the song he presented in his pamphlet, but when I finally did find the complete song and the story of its transcription, his claims were validated in their entirety (see song notes in chapter 3).

THE AMERICAN SLAVE: A COMPOSITE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

At the Library of Congress, I encountered the Federal Writers Project, which was conducted under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939.¹⁴ This project produced the Slave Narrative Collection comprised of 2,300 first-person interviews with people who had been enslaved in every southern state as well as a few outside the South (Indiana and Ohio, in particular). It was in this collection that I found the song “Agonizing, Cruel Slavery Days.”

As I was seeking to verify the songs presented by John Greenway in his American Folksongs of Protest, I realized I would have to consult the collection. Greenway had attributed the “Year of Jubalo” to “Informant: Merton Knowles, WPA Project Worker: ‘Heard it from my mother, it was brought back by returning Union soldiers, and became a part of our folklore.’ (Indiana) In Library of Congress, Archive of American Song.” Greenway attributed “Old Massa, He Come Dancin’ Out” similarly, notating it as “Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, WPA Collection. Collected by Merton Knowles of Indiana from his mother, who learned and sang the song after the Civil War.”

What happened when I attempted to locate these attributions in the online archive provided by the Library of Congress was unexpected. First, I couldn’t find the attributions where they were supposed to be. Second, I discovered that what was available online from the Library of Congress was incomplete. Further inquiry led me to a different collection based on the Federal Writers Project but enhanced by more extensive use of the original materials, which were in some cases never sent to Washington, DC, from the states where the interviews had taken place. Much material had been left collecting dust in state archives (Mississippi and Alabama, for example). The tedious work of sifting through this material was undertaken by George Rawick. His herculean effort resulted in the forty-one volume The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. The first nineteen volumes were published in 1972, the next twelve in 1977, and the final ten in 1979. In 1997, a name index was created by Howard Potts, and in 2004 the entire collection was made available online by Greenwood Publishing. Unfortunately, the online edition was no longer available when I went to consult it, so I had to locate an institution that had the printed books.

Public access was available at the open stacks of Tufts University in Somerville, MA. I spent three days going through all forty-one volumes seeking both verification for Greenway’s attributions and more evidence to, hopefully, complete my research.

First, I was able to locate the attributions Greenway made and verify their accuracy. I was even able to solve the mystery of Merton Knowles. Greenway’s attribution did not make clear if Knowles was the interviewer or interviewee. I discovered that Knowles was both. He was a former slave and had contributed his own recollections as well as those of his mother.

Second, I was able to discover a great deal more about one song in particular, “The Year of Jubalo.” (See song notes in chapter 3 for details.)

Third, I was excited to discover in Rawick’s The American Slave the complete text of “Agonizing, Cruel Slavery Days” and the story of the man who brought it to the collection. The entry read: “Elijah Cox (Uncle Cox) was free-born in Michigan in 1843 and consequently was not a slave. Association with the ex-slaves, however, after he came to Fort Concho in 1871, furnished him with a broad knowledge of slavery days and he wished to contribute the following song which he learned at Fort Concho, having heard the ex-slaves sing it many times, as it was one of their favorite songs.”¹⁵

The Rawick collection provided more than these particular data, however. Certain songs appeared often, over a wide geographical range. Among these were “Amazing Grace” and “Run, Nigger, Run.” I did not have the time to do a proper accounting, but it was my impression that “Run, Nigger, Run” was the most often mentioned song. Others frequently mentioned were Christian hymns or “Negro spirituals,” but surprisingly few were those most famous such as “Deep River,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” or “Go Down, Moses.”

Let me again emphasize that The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography is of incalculable importance. The treasures it contains will inspire historians and artists for decades to come.

SINFUL TUNES AND SPIRITUALS

I first encountered the work of Dena J. Epstein during my visit to the Library of Congress. The library contains a two-part essay published in sequential editions, spring and summer 1963, of Music Library Association Notes. The essay’s title, “Slave Music in the United States before 1860: A Survey of Sources,” drew me to it for obvious reasons. Epstein’s essay was more than informative; it was inspiring. Its existence made it clear to me that others had had similar questions to my own and that a great deal of work had been done to answer them. This essay led me, in turn, to Epstein’s great book, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977).

There are two reasons to call attention to this book among the many sources I relied upon. The first is the sheer quantity and quality of information regarding music and music-making it offers that other historical accounts do not provide. Epstein, for example, is largely responsible for proving beyond doubt that the banjo originated in Africa and not the United States. But this is only one among many popular myths she dispelled. Epstein went to great lengths to answer questions that had puzzled musicologists and folklorists for decades following the Civil War—indeed, down to the 1960s when Epstein assembled her data. For example, she explored how to account for not only African or European elements but also their hybrid or creolized offspring in North America, and why these differed from the music slaves made in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas.

Epstein was well aware that racist ideology and defense of the slave system had warped previous research, not only burying important evidence but obscuring obvious facts. The slave system itself changed over time and affected musical practices accordingly. This helps explain the instruments slaves learned to play (e.g., the fiddle) and the interpenetration of diverse influences (e.g., European, African, and Native American) in composition and performance. Instead of mystification regarding Africans’ “natural” musical proclivity, we now understand the role music played in slaves’ survival aboard ship, their building of community in the Americas, and their being used as musicians by masters.

The information, however unequivocal it might appear to us today, is conditioned by controversies prevalent at various stages. It is difficult to imagine that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, it was still necessary to “prove” the humanity of Black people; that there were folklorists, song collectors, and musicologists still claiming that Black music derived exclusively from European sources (Africa having been long forgotten); or that Black scholars would have to defend Black composers’ intellectual achievement as opposed to the “instinctual” or “natural” one assigned to them by racist ideologies. Different periods are marked by different writers fighting on multiple fronts, including Frederick Douglass before the Civil War, James Weldon Johnson in 1925, John Lovell in 1939, Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones in 1963. The battles these and other writers waged were in large part defined by their opponents’ changing positions, which, in turn, corresponded to the advances of the struggle for Black liberation.

Epstein’s work, overall, complements that of Eileen Southern, whose invaluable contributions were discussed in chapter 1 of this book.

AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SONGS

This collection of almost five hundred songs was meticulously assembled by Vicki Lynn Eaklor and published in 1988. Eaklor’s work helped immeasurably in the selections I made for my project. Even though I had previously located William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp and James McCarter Simpson’s Emancipation Car, which are collections of songs, I knew there were many other songs that lay scattered about in myriad newspapers (The Liberator, for example), hymnals, books of poetry, and so on. The range of sources expanded further when Tim Eriksen informed me of the connection between shape-note singing and abolitionism. Songs in The Sacred Harp and other songbooks used in the shape-note tradition also had to be included. I was overwhelmed with the amount of cross-referencing I would have to do to provide a selection that accurately reflected the musical and lyrical variety I knew existed. When I came upon Eaklor’s American Anti-Slavery Songs, it made accomplishing this task possible. Having all the lyrics and the musical accompaniment in one well-arranged and documented source made all the difference. I could, for example, compare the introductions Joshua McCarter Simpson wrote to the various editions of his collections (there were three) as well as compare the lyrics that were put to the same tune by different authors. “The Marseillaise” and “Scots Wha Hae,” for example, were frequently used as the musical basis for diverse texts, and Eaklor listed these tunes and how often they were employed. I could also go to Eaklor’s sources both to verify accuracy and to view the songs in their published setting (e.g., The Liberator newspaper). Eaklor’s research proved to be impeccable, while her analysis of the continued relevance of songs in the abolitionist movement is useful to this day.

OF SPECIAL NOTE

One more book needs mention since it provided early encouragement for my effort. This is The Freedmen’s Book by Lydia Maria Child, published in 1865. This compilation of writings includes the work of three African American poets, Frances E. W. Harper, Phillis Wheatley, and George Horton, who are among those whose texts first convinced me there were songs of the kind I was looking for. Harper (1825–1911) was born free and was an abolitionist. Her poem “Bury Me in a Free Land” gained wide renown in her lifetime. Wheatley and Horton, though enslaved, became famous through their poetry, including Horton’s book The Hope of Liberty (1829).

Child’s The Freedmen’s Book contains the writings of leading abolitionists Frederick Douglass, Charlotte L. Forten, and John G. Whittier, as well as many pieces by Child herself. Among these are brief biographies of Benjamin Banneker, John Brown, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. The book was dedicated to “the loyal and brave Captain Robert Small, Hero of the Steamboat Planter,” and its purpose was clearly stated in the introduction: “To The Freedmen, I have prepared this book expressly for you, with the hope that those of you who can read will read it aloud to others, and that all of you will derive fresh strength and courage from this true record of what colored men have accomplished under great disadvantages.” Robert Small (actually Smalls, with a final “s”) was an enslaved man trained as a naval pilot. He managed to free himself and his crew by commandeering the Planter, a Confederate ship loaded with munitions, and skillfully navigating an escape to the Union Navy waiting outside Charleston harbor. This episode took place in 1862, and Smalls not only became a hero, but he played a role in convincing Lincoln to accept Black men into the Union Army.

Child’s book is representative of a much larger body of literature born of the abolitionist movement, much of which is still readily available and continues to provide a useful antidote to mischaracterizations plaguing our understanding of history. With such resources, it is possible to more accurately follow the course of a centuries-long struggle and its poetical-musical expression.