Chapter 4
I USED THREE MAIN SOURCES FOR THESE SONGS: THE ANTI-SLAVERY HARP: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848), compiled by William Wells Brown; The Emancipation Car: Being an Original Composition of Anti-Slavery Ballads Composed Exclusively for the Under Ground Rail Road (1854), compiled by Joshua McCarter Simpson; and American Anti-Slavery Songs (1988) by Vicki L. Eaklor. The original publications from which Eaklor compiled nearly five hundred individual songs included the following: The Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821–1839), Benjamin Lundy, editor; The Liberator (1831–1865), William Lloyd Garrison, editor; An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) by Lydia Maria Child; Songs of the Free and Hymns of Christian Freedom (1836) by Maria Wright Chapman; Anti-Slavery Melodies (1843) by Jairus Lincoln; and The Liberty Minstrel (1844) by George W. Clark.
Other sources include songs from The Sacred Harp (1844), a songbook using shape-note music notation. “Shape-note” is a choral singing tradition originating in the eighteenth century and subsequently popularized throughout New England and the South. In the recording with my collection, songs deriving from this tradition were performed by a shape-note group in Amherst, Massachusetts, under the direction of Professor Tim Eriksen.
At the wise suggestion of a chorus member, the recording of these songs took place at the David Ruggles Center in Florence, Massachusetts. (Ruggles was a famed abolitionist whose former residence now houses the center.) The day of the recording, Eriksen and I discovered on the wall of the center a poem by David Ruggles called “Woman’s Rights.” Ruggles set his lyrics to a tune in The Sacred Harp that was well known by the group called “The Indian Philosopher” or “Ganges.” On the spot, we added the song with Ruggles’s lyrics to our repertoire.
It should be noted that some of these texts are set to what were known at the time as minstrel songs, “comic negro songs,” or “Ethiopian melodies” intended to mock and degrade Black people. Blackface minstrelsy was repudiated by notable figures such as Frederick Douglass, who condemned the lot as “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.”1
“Dandy Jim” was one such tune. It was used by Joshua McCarter Simpson as a setting for “A Song for Freedom.” This choice of music served the double purpose of putting a popular tune to abolitionist use and turning a tune perpetuating the enslavement of Black people into a weapon for their emancipation. Simpson explains this choice in the introduction to his Original Anti-Slavery Songs (1852), which preceded The Emancipation Car by two years:
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.
The title of each abolitionist song is followed, in parentheses, by the name of the tune to which it is set. In titles of songs, small adjustments have been made to modernize capitalization, spelling, and punctuation. In Part II, the text of lyrics is shown as it appeared in the most authoritative source, with a few obvious typos corrected.
1. “COME JOIN THE ABOLITIONISTS”
(“WHEN I CAN READ MY TITLE CLEAR”)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in The Liberty Minstrel (1845), compiled by George W. Clark.
2. “WE’RE COMING! WE’RE COMING!”
(“KINLOCH OF KINLOCH”)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), compiled by William Wells Brown.
3. “THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD”
(“NANCY TILL”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
4. “A SONG FOR FREEDOM”
(“DANDY JIM”)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), compiled by William Wells Brown.
5. “TO THE WHITE PEOPLE OF AMERICA”
(“MASSA’S IN THE COLD, COLD GROUND”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
6. “SONG OF THE ‘ALIENED AMERICAN’”
(“AMERICA [MY COUNTRY, ’TIS OF THEE]”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
7. “THE VOICE OF SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND NOMINALLY FREE”
(“THE MARSEILLAISE”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
8. “THE BAND OF THIEVES”
(“SCOTS WHA HAE”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
9. “FLIGHT OF THE BONDMAN”
(“SILVER MOON”)
· Author Elias Smith, dedicated to William Wells Brown and sung by the Hutchinsons.
· Found in The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), compiled by William Wells Brown.
10. “THE TRUE SPIRIT”
(“ROSIN THE BOW”)
· Author Joshua McCarter Simpson.
· Found in The Emancipation Car (1854) by Joshua McCarter Simpson.
11. “RIGHT ON”
(“LENOX”)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), compiled by William Wells Brown.
12. “WOMAN’S RIGHTS”
(“GANGES/INDIAN PHILOSOPHER”)
· Author David Ruggles.
· Found on wall at David Ruggles Center, Florence, Massachusetts.
13. “LIBERTY”
(“LIBERTY”)
· Author unknown; composer Stephen Jenks.
· Found in The Sacred Harp (1844).
14. “WHAT MEAN YE?”
(“ORTONVILLE”)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in American Anti-Slavery Songs (1988) by Vicki L. Eaklor; from various sources, the earliest being Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1836.
15. “STOLE AND SOLD FROM AFRICA”
(ADDIE GRAHAM’S VERSION)
· Author unspecified.
· Found in The Digital Library of Appalachia, Berea College Collection, performed by Addie Graham.