Chapter 3
THE SONGS DISCUSSED IN THIS CHAPTER ARE ARRANGED IN APPROXIMATELY chronological order, oldest first, except for two special cases at the end of the list. In titles of songs, small adjustments have been made to modernize capitalization, spelling, and punctuation. Lyrics of the songs, here and in Part II, are shown as they appeared in the most authoritative source, with a few obvious typos corrected.
1. “UNCLE GABRIEL, THE NEGRO GENERAL” (CA. 1800)
I found three versions of this song. The first was in Poor Jack, a novel by Frederick Marryat published in 1840, in which the title was written as “Gin’ral Gabriel-sea chanty.” The second version was collected by Lawrence Gellert and published in the February 1963 issue of Mainstream; and the third was in the Christy Minstrels’ Ethiopian Glee Book (1849).1
I made a composite of the Gellert and Ethiopian Glee Book versions since they were quite similar. The sea chanty was substantively similar but formally different. The texts are obviously derived from the same source: the story is told in a similar way, but the music must have been different. The rhythm of Gellert’s and the Ethiopian Glee Book versions is clearly the same, while the chanty doesn’t fit.
2. “HYMN OF FREEDOM” (1813)
I first discovered this song in 2015 in Herbert Aptheker’s Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860 (1939), where it had the following description: “Sung by the Negroes on the island opposite Charleston, during the late War with Britain composed by one of themselves.”
Two years later, historian Steven Garabedian located the rest of the song by the following means. He located the lyrics in Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (1993). On page 349 of his book, Harding cites his source as follows: “The words of the song and an account of its transmission are in John H. Moore, ‘A Hymn of Freedom—South Carolina, 1813,’ JNH, 50 (Jan. 1965), 50–53.” The Moore article was published in the Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Journal of Negro History, vol. 50, no. 1.
The Moore article features excerpts from two primary sources. The first is Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book (1865). In what Child calls “The Meeting in the Swamp” (pp. 104–10), she provides a slaveowner’s eyewitness account of the clandestine meeting where the insurrection was being planned and the “Hymn” performed.
The second primary source Moore cites is John Forsyth’s letter to Benson John Lossing, lead editor of Harper’s Encyclopedia of United States History (1905), in which there is another account of the same incident with further elaboration. Added to the original account is a report of the related movements of British Admiral Cockburn directly off the coast of South Carolina. This report deserves quoting in full:
When 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. The following is the last of the three stanzas of the hymn alluded to:
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.
They held meetings every night, and had arranged a plan for the rising of all the slaves in Charleston when the British should appear. At one of the meetings the question, “What shall be done with the white people?” was warmly discussed. Some advocated their indiscriminate slaughter as the only security for liberty, and this seemed to be the prevailing opinion, when the leader and the author of the hymn came in and said: “Brethren, you know me. You know that I am ready to gain your liberty and mine. But not one needless drop of blood must be shed. I have a master whom I love, and the man who takes his life must pass over my dead body.” Had Cockburn been faithful to his promises to the negroes, and landed and declared freedom to the slaves of South Carolina, no doubt many thousands of colored people would have flocked to his standard. But he was content to fill his pockets by plundering and carrying on a petty slave-trade for his private gain. (pp. 211–12)
I subsequently located Aptheker’s original source in the bibliography of American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) as “Lossing, Benson J., A Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 (1868).” In a footnote, Lossing recounts the tale, records the lyrics, and says it was sung to the tune of “Hail, Columbia.”
Finally, I found a recording of “Hail Columbia” and checked for a correspondence with the words of “Hymn of Freedom.” Not only did the text accord with the structure of the original song, but the text of the original had clearly been used as a basis for a transformation—that is, a parody with a twist. It was not sarcastic parody poking fun, but rather a rejoinder to the pompous claims of the original.
3. “THE NEGRO’S COMPLAINT” (CA. 1820)
This song was sung to the tune of “Old Hundred” by Rev. Thomas Cooper (ca. 1775–ca. 1823) as published in his The African Pilgrim’s Hymns (1820), which contained 372 hymns used by congregations in London and Africa. My source for this information is John Lovell’s Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972), in which he writes, “His [Cooper’s] book … , partly composed and partly collected, contained 372 hymns; many of them are reminiscent of the most radical of the spirituals” (pp. 106–7).
4. “RECOGNITION MARCH OF THE INDEPENDANCE OF HAYTI” (PUBLISHED IN 1820)
I discovered this composition in the Library of Congress. The march, written for piano and flute, was composed by Francis Johnson, a free Black man who was an abolitionist and one of the most famous band leaders of the early nineteenth century. Johnson also composed “The Grave of the Slave” to a poem published in The Liberator that was written by Sarah Forten, a leading abolitionist author using the penname “Ada.”
5. “THE AFRICAN HYMN” (CA. 1830)
My source for this song is Stephen B. Oates’s The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (1975). Oates writes: “And in Prince William, Stafford, and King George counties along the Potomac River, in the sweltering stone quarries there, the slaves sang a spiritual called ‘The African Hymn,’ composed by the Reverend Shadrack Bassett. The lyrics were more prophetic than the slaves in northern Virginia could have known” (pp. 133–34).
Oates cites these sources for the lyrics: “Copy of African Hymn’ in Floyd’s Free Negro and Slave Letterbook, Archives of the Virginia State Library; George Cooke to Floyd, September 13, 1831, Virginia Governors’ Papers, ibid.; N. Sutton to Floyd, September 21, 1831, ibid.; ‘A Friend to the City’ to Floyd [November, 1831], ibid.; and Richmond Enquirer, September 17, 1831.”
According to Scraps of African Methodist Episcopal History by Rt. Rev. James A. Handy, “Rev. Shadrack Bassett was appointed to the Eastern Shore…. He organized churches at Easton, Denton and Ivory town, and extended the church to French Town, and the Rev. Jeremiah Miller organized churches at Cecilton, Port Deposit and Octorara. These pioneers of our church in Maryland spread the work from the Choptank, on the Eastern Shore, to the Susquehanna River.”
One additional piece of verification comes from Dena J. Epstein’s summer 1963 article in Music Library Association Notes titled “Slave Music in the United States before 1860: A Survey of Sources (Part 2).”
Epstein quotes an interview conducted by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child with an old formerly enslaved woman named Charity Bowery, “who was born,” Epstein writes, “at Pembroke, North Carolina, about 1774.” Epstein continues:
Child asked Bowery about the reaction following the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831 and Bowery said:
“The brightest and best men were killed in Nat’s time. Such ones are always suspected. All the colored folks were afraid to pray in the time of the old Prophet Nat. There was no law about it; but the whites reported it round among themselves that, if a note was heard, we should have some dreadful punishment; and after that, the low whites would fall upon any slaves they heard praying, or singing a hymn, and often killed them before their masters or mistresses could get to them.”
I asked Charity to give me a specimen of their hymns. In a voice cracked with age … she sang:
A few more beatings of the wind and rain,
Ere the winter will be over—
Glory, Hallelujah!
Some friends has gone before me,—
I must try to go and meet them—
Glory, Hallelujah!
A few more risings and settings of the sun,
Ere the winter will be over—
Glory, Hallelujah!
There’s a better day a coming—
There’s a better day a coming—
Oh, Glory, Hallelujah!
With a very arch expression, she looked up, as she concluded, and said, “They wouldn’t let us sing that. They wouldn’t let us sing that. They thought we was going to rise, because we sung, ‘better days are coming.’”
Child’s interview was initially published as Lydia Maria Child, “Charity Bowery,” in The Liberty Bell: By Friends of Freedom, edited by Maria W. Chapman (Boston: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), pp. 42–43.
The reader will note that “there’s a better day a coming” is the repeated refrain of “The African Hymn.” I could not locate the music, so I composed a melody according to styles that were then current.
6. “NAT TURNER” (CA. 1830, COMPOSED AFTER NAT TURNER’S REBELLION OF 1831)
I first discovered this song as titled “The Gainin’ Ground” in Pete Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone (p. 236). I later discovered it in John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest (pp. 92–93) and Russell Ames’s The Story of American Folk Song (1955, pp. 151–52). All three attribute discovery of the song to Lawrence Gellert. This attribution is confirmed by Gellert in the February 1963 issue of Mainstream.
Steven Garabedian shared with me the following notes from his interview with Pete Seeger on June 28, 2002: “He [Seeger] only met ‘Larry’ Gellert … late in Gellert’s life during the folk boom years; Gellert was very thin and old at the time—he gave Seeger the lyrics and music to ‘Nat Turner,’ but the music didn’t make sense at all and simply did not fit the lyrics. So, Seeger wrote new music; he did it on an album; Rev. F. D. Kirkpatrick sang it as well.”
Garabedian also interviewed Israel Young, proprietor of the Folklore Center in New York City. His notes from that interview are as follows: “First phone conversation, 7/18/02. Izzy tracked down this Gellert song mentioned by Pete Seeger in our conversation, ‘Nat Turner’; it’s in P. Foner, American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century, it’s in Greenway, it’s in Seeger’s Incompleat Folksinger and Where Have All the Flowers Gone; slightly changed as ‘Gaining Ground’ (p. 263).”
I could not locate a recording of either the Rev. F. D. Kirkpatrick or Seeger versions, nor could I make the Seeger tablature work. I therefore composed a melody that fit styles current at the time.
7. “MARCH ON” (DATE UNDETERMINED)
I first discovered this song as number 44 (p. 166) in J. B. T. Marsh’s The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs (1880). The song was referred to by both John Lovell in Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) and John Wesley Work in Folk Song of the American Negro (1915). These references were, however, not complete, and it was only in The Story of the Jubilee Singers that I found both full text and tablature.
I later located a version of the song collected by Lawrence Gellert and published in Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology (1934). That text reads:
Oh brethren rise, give praise to glory
For the year of the Jubilee
Do you want to be a soldier
For the year of the Jubilee
Oh what you say brother
Oh what you say brother
Oh what you say brother
About dis wahr
I will die in the field
Stay in the field
Stay in the field brother
Stay in the field
Until the victory
March on and you shall gain the victory
March on an you shall gain the day
We want no cowards in our band
We call for only the strongest men
I intend to fight and never stop
Until I reach mountain top
8. “CHILDREN, WE ALL SHALL BE FREE” (DATE UNDETERMINED)
I first discovered this song as number 6 (p. 130) in J. B. T. Marsh’s The Story of the Jubilee Singers with Their Songs (1880). The song was referred to by both John Lovell in Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (1972) and John Wesley Work in Folk Song of the American Negro (1915).
9. “WE’LL SOON BE FREE/MY FATHER, HOW LONG?” (1860s)
I found two versions of the same song. The first was in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). Higginson noted that, for singing this, “the negroes had been put in jail in Georgetown, S.C., at the outbreak of the Rebellion. ‘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. ‘De Lord will call us home’ was evidently thought to be a symbolical verse; for, as a little drummer boy explained it to me, showing all his white teeth as he sat in the moonlight by the door of my tent, ‘Dey tink de Lord mean for say de Yankees.’” (p. 169). The second version was in Allen, Ware, and Garrison’s Slave Songs of the United States (1867; section IV, number 112).
For this collection, I made a composite lyric and based the music on that provided in Slave Songs of the United States.
10. “THE ENLISTED SOLDIERS” (1860s)
I first discovered this song in Fenner, Rathbun, and Cleaveland’s Cabin and Plantation Songs as Sung by the Hampton Students (1901), which quoted the following recollection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, commander of the 8th US Colored Infantry regiment: “While recruiting and drilling the 9th Regiment, U.S. Colored troops at Benedict, Maryland, in the winter of 1863–64, the men gathered around the camp-fire would sing by the hour the melodies of the plantation slave life that they had just left—not always very melodious; but late one evening I was startled by a magnificent chorus from nearly a thousand black soldiers, that called me from my tent to listen to its most inspiring strains, and I caught the following words which I called the ‘Negro Battle Hymn’” (p. 146).
I found a second reference to this song in Dena J. Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977; pp. 293–94). The complete song is not presented in that book, but enough of the lyrics appear to confirm that it was the same song. The circumstances are similar to those recorded by Samuel Chapman Armstrong. Epstein cited her source as “Henry Goddard Thomas, Colonel, 2d Brigade, ‘The Colored Troops at Petersburg,’ Century Magazine 34, n.s. 12 (September, 1887): 778.” She noted that Thomas reported this song was sung every night as the troops were preparing for the battle of “The Crater,” which took place at Petersburg, Virginia, July 30, 1864.
Of further note, almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought for the Union in the Civil War. They were joined by an additional 200,000 men and women who served behind the lines in various support functions. In this sense, the alternate title, “The Negro Battle Hymn,” represents the culmination of centuries of slave revolts as masses of former slaves emancipated themselves by force of arms.
11. “THE YEAR OF JUBALO,” “YEAR OF JUBILO,” AND “KINGDOM COMING” (1860s)
I found three versions of this song and present all three in Part II. The first was in John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest (1953). Greenway’s attribution reads: “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” (p. 104). The second version was identical to a song by Henry Clay Work entitled “Kingdom Coming.” That song was composed and published in 1861 and became popular at that time. It was likely to have been sung by Union troops as was Work’s most famous composition, “Marching through Georgia.”
The third version was in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, edited by George Rawick (1972; V01.3 Series 2 [Texas]). The song was reported by Lorenzo Ezell, a formerly enslaved man from Beaumont, Texas, District 3, who said, as recorded in what is now called African American Vernacular English: “My ol’ marster run off and stay in de woods a whole week w’en Sherman men come t’rough. He didn’ need to worry ’cause us tek care of eb’ryt’ing. Dey was a funny song w’at us mek up ’bout him runnin’ off in de woods. I know it was mek up ’cause my uncle hab a han’ in it. It went like dis.”
I made a composite of the three versions and consider it a slave song because at least some slaves made it their own. This decision is further justified by what I learned later. After completing the recording of this song, I discovered a version in Negro Folk Rhymes, Wise and Otherwise (1922) by Thomas Talley. Talley presented as two separate songs what are clearly parts of one complete song in my collection. (See the slave song lyrics in Part II for comparison.) Talley presented the following:
MASTER IS SIX FEET ONE WAY
Mosser is six foot one way, an’ free foot tudder;
An’ he weigh five hunderd pound.
Britches cut so big dat dey don’t suit de tailor,
An’ dey don’t meet half way ’round.
Mosser’s coat come back to a claw-hammer p’int.
(Speak sof’ or his Bloodhound’ll bite us.)
His long white stockin’s mighty clean an’ nice,
But a liddle mō’ holier dan righteous.
YEAR OF JUBILEE
Niggers, has you seed ole Mosser;
(Red mustache on his face.)
A-gwine ’roun’ sometime dis mawnin,’
’Spectin’ to leave de place?
Nigger Hands all runnin’ ’way,
Looks lak we mought git free!
It mus’ be now de Kingdom Come
In de Year o’ Jubilee.
Oh, yon’er comes ole Mosser
Wid his red mustache all white!
It mus’ be now de Kingdom Come
Sometime to-morrer night.
Yanks locked him in de smokehouse cellar,
De key’s throwed in de well:
It shō’ mus’ be de Kingdom Come.
Go ring dat Nigger field-bell!
It is not unlikely that Henry Clay Work’s “Kingdom Coming” was sung by Union soldiers, transmitted to newly liberated people, who thereupon adopted and adapted the song. It then could have been re-learned by other Union soldiers, who brought it back with them to Indiana. This circular motion is common in folk song transmission.
It could, however, have been the other way around, and Work heard a version of a slave song and used it as a basis for his published version. Talley’s notes suggest this explanation. Talley writes: “Some of the rhymes are very old indeed. If one will but read ‘Master Is Six Feet One Way,’ found in our collection, he will find in it a description of a slave owner attired in Colonial garb. It clearly belongs, as to date of composition, either to Colonial days, or to the very earliest years of the American Republic. When we consider it as a slave rhyme, it is far from crudest, notwithstanding the early period of its production” (p. 348).
The complicating factor is the reference to Abraham Lincoln (“Linkum gunboats”) in both Work’s published version and those found in the Federal Writers Project versions. Indeed, the testimony of the formerly enslaved man recorded in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography indicates that the song was “made up” during the Civil War. This does not necessarily contradict Talley since it’s very common for new songs to be built on old songs; in short, the basis for the Civil War-era song was older slave songs.
One further note: in consulting all forty-one volumes of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, I found certain songs mentioned over a wide geographic range. Many were introduced by stories the informants told that made their origin difficult to ascertain.
12. “OLD MASSA, HE COME DANCIN’ OUT” (1860s)
I found this song in John Greenway’s American Folksongs of Protest (1953). His attribution reads: “Lib. of Cong. Archive American Folk Song, WPA Collection. Collected by Merton Knowles of Indiana from his mother, who learned and sang the song after the Civil War” (pp. 104–5). I confirmed this information by consulting George Rawick’s The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (1972; vol. 5, series 1, Alabama and Indiana), where I also confirmed that Merton Knowles was formerly enslaved (pp. 69, 108–9).
I could not locate the music, so I composed a melody according to styles current at the time.
13. “AGONIZING, CRUEL SLAVERY DAYS” (CA. 1870s)
I originally found two recordings of this song at the Library of Congress. Accompanying the 1/4” tape recording was a note saying the performer of the song was Elijah Cox, who was ninety-three years old. There was no further information. I copied the lyrics from the audio recording.
By chance, I located the text in volume 3, series 2 (Texas) of The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (1972), edited by George Rawick. The entry reads: “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” (pp. 952–53).
I made a composite of the lyrics I’d heard on the audio recording with the lyrics Cox recited to the interviewer in The American Slave.
14. “THE DIRGE OF ST. MALO” (CA. 1785)
I discovered this song in The Social Implications of Early Negro Music in the United States (1969), edited by Bernard Katz, in chapter 6 entitled “Dance in the Place Congo and Creole Slave Songs” by George Washington Cable. The editor’s note preceding the chapter reads:
George Washington Cable, a native of New Orleans who fought in the Confederate Army, was forced to leave the South because his writings expressed his distaste for southern postwar mistreatment of the Negro. Cable, Henry Krehbiel, and the irascible, one-eyed poet and writer, Lafcadio Hearn, at one time collected Creole songs in a project that broke up over the mutual distrust of Cable and Hearn. Some of Cable’s Creole songs had already appeared in Slave Songs of the United States, nineteen years before the publication of … articles in The Century Magazine. (p. 54)
This song is only a fragment, presented in both Louisiana Creole and English. Cable’s introduction to the song is worth quoting, as he calls on us to notice:
the stately tone of lamentation over the fate of a famous negro insurrectionist, as sung by old Madeleine of St. Bernard parish to the same Creole friend … , who kindly wrote down the lines on the spot for this collection. They are fragmentary, extorted by littles from the shattered memory of the old crone. Their allusion to the Cabildo places their origin in the days when that old colonial council administered Spanish rule over the province. (p. 54)
Juan St. Malo was indeed an “insurrectionist” and a leader of a group of maroons in Spanish Louisiana. An expeditionary force eventually captured St. Malo, And he was executed in New Orleans in 1784. For further information about St. Malo, the best source I found is Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1992). Hall was kind enough to answer my many inquiries about slave songs in Louisiana.
15. “REBELDIA NA BANDABOU” (CA. 1795)
I discovered this song in Nanette de Jong’s Tambu (1992), pp. 43–44. It was composed by slaves in Curaçao to celebrate a slave rebellion that occurred in 1795. The song is performed to this day in the language of Papiamentu, a Portuguese-based creole language that is one of the official languages of Curaçao. In English, the title is “Rebellion at Bandabou.”