Songs of Slavery and Emancipation

Mat Callahan

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496840172
• eBook ISBN: 9781496840226
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Throughout the history of slavery, enslaved people organized resistance, escape, and rebellion. Sustaining them in this struggle was their music, some examples of which are sung to this day. While the existence of slave songs, especially spirituals, is well known, their character is often misunderstood. Slave songs were not only lamentations of suffering or distractions from a life of misery. Some songs openly called for liberty and revolution, celebrating such heroes as Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, and, especially, celebrating the Haitian Revolution.

The fight for freedom also included fugitive slaves, free Black people, and their white allies who brought forth a?set of songs that were once widely disseminated but are now largely forgotten, the songs of the abolitionists. Often composed by fugitive slaves and free Black people, and first appearing in the eighteenth century, these songs continued to be written and sung until the Civil War. As the movement expanded, abolitionists even published song books used at public meetings.

Mat Callahan presents recently discovered songs composed by enslaved people explicitly calling for resistance to slavery, some originating as early as 1784 and others as late as the Civil War. He also presents long-lost songs of the abolitionist movement, some written by fugitive slaves and free Black people, challenging common misconceptions of abolitionism. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation features the lyrics of fifteen slave songs and fifteen abolitionist songs, placing them in proper historical context and making them available again to the general public. These songs not only express outrage at slavery but call for militant resistance and destruction of the slave system. There can be no doubt as to their purpose: the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of African American people, and a clear and undeniable demand for equality and justice for all humanity.

Part I

DISCOVERY AND AUTHENTICATION

INTRODUCTION

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY

To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds.

—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

The only thing they had that couldn’t be taken from them was their music. Their song, it was coming right up from the fields, settling itself in their feet and working right up, right up into their stomachs, their spirit, into their fear, into their longing. It was bewildered, this part in them. It was like it had no end, nowhere even to wait for an end, nowhere to hope for a change in things. But it had a beginning, and that much they understood…. it was a feeling in them, a memory that came from a long way back.

—SIDNEY BECHET, TREAT IT GENTLE

WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THE FACT THAT HUMAN BEINGS HELD AS PROPerty are responsible for the Americas’ greatest cultural and artistic gift to the world? That America’s modern freedom songs can be traced directly to enslaved Africans and the men and women dedicated to destroying human bondage? Given the sheer volume of music created by Africans held in captivity, fugitives, and their abolitionist allies throughout the Atlantic World, it is not an exaggeration to claim that “American” folk music was forged in the crucible of slavery. And what has been recovered and documented represents just a fraction of the music created by the enslaved. Lost are the many thousands of songs improvised in slave coffles, in the holds of ships, by work gangs on plantations and waterfronts—songs sung in Hausa, Ki-Kongo, Bambara, Yoruba, Ibo, Fante, Wolof, Twi, Mende, Krio, or creolized versions of these languages synthesized and mixed with French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

On the other hand, we’ve all been taught that the slaves sang, and sang well, courtesy of racist stereotypes of Africans as naturally musical people. From antebellum minstrel shows to technicolor movies, American popular culture peddled images of Black bodies dancing and singing in cotton fields, in the master’s house, at makeshift prayer meetings. Ironically, the hypervisibility of the singing and dancing slave contributed to the erasure of the African’s repertoire, reducing the full breadth of music to select tunes—mostly spirituals: “Steal Away,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” “Brothers, Don’t Get Weary,” and the like. Scholars and educated folk singers know better; thanks to their efforts there is a fairly small body of recordings and book-length studies of these original freedom songs.¹

Enter Mat Callahan. An extraordinary musician, social critic, activist, Mat came of age in the San Francisco Bay area during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, shaped by antiwar, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles for a more just world. Through a variety of bands and collectives, including Red Rock, Prairie Fire, the Looters, and Komotion International, Mat sought to roll back the right-wing ascendance of neoliberalism with music and protest. He watched in horror as popular music increasingly became the expression of this new order, dulling minds and promoting unbridled consumption as the new religion. And he responded with a powerful manifesto, The Trouble with Music (AK Press, 2005), and a deep dive into the radical legacy of American antislavery music.

Without repeating the story he tells below, I will note that this book and the accompanying film and recording project were inspired by a 1939 pamphlet by the late historian Herbert Aptheker titled Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860. ² In its pages Mat encountered “A Hymn of Freedom,” sometimes known as “The Negro Hymn of Freedom,” most likely the earliest known example in North America of a song by enslaved people openly calling for rebellion. Aptheker himself discovered the song while perusing Benson J. Lossing’s massive The Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (1869).³ The call for revolution by means of armed struggle is precisely what caught Mat’s attention, propelling him on this journey to discover the clandestine repertoire that was never intended to be discovered, collected, and catalogued until freedom came, alongside the abolitionist songbook whose clarion call deliberately set out to break slavery’s hold in the presumptive land of liberty.

You won’t find your standard work ditties or classic spirituals in Songs of Slavery and Emancipation. Rather, Callahan has selected songs that make demands, expose truths, tell stories of rebellion from Virginia to Louisiana, from Haiti to Curaçao. We owe their preservation to the free Black community, the children of the Civil War who lived long enough to share their memories of slavery with interviewers in the 1930s, the white allies who encountered freedom songs in the heat of abolitionist meetings or on the Civil War battlefield, and those inveterate collectors who looked to Black music for the best traditions of American resistance to injustice.

And yet, to claim that these songs were exceptional, distinct from the larger body of music produced by African people in the New World, would be a grave mistake. We have to understand the power of song as expressions of pain and joy, memory and morality, fear and faith, hope and humor, love, loss, and longing. Their lyrical swords were aimed not only at the Goliath of modern capitalist slavery, but the daily acts of dehumanization it wrought. Enslaved Africans forged America’s first abolitionist political culture—a culture grounded in the realm of everyday life of work, family, religion, art, and a memory of the African past. In other words, they did not need an abolitionist movement to teach them about freedom. They were the first abolitionists, and they emerged out of bondage with a clear vision of what freedom should look, feel, and sound like. Historian Manisha Sinha said it best: “the story of abolition must begin with the struggles of the enslaved.”⁴

ROOTS

Although we tend to associate Africans with the drum, the peoples kidnapped from West and Central Africa came from cultures with a rich tradition of stringed instruments—lutes, koras, bowed fiddles, and what on this side of the Atlantic came to be known as the banjo. Tonal instruments were commonplace and were re-created in some form or another in the Western Hemisphere. These include the balafon (wooden xylophone), fife, panpipe with single and double reeds, mbira (“thumb piano”), and a variety of mouth bows (called the “Jew’s harp” by blues musicians). Drums were certainly important in many African cultures, but their absence did not mean the disappearance of rhythm. Performers kept time on the body by hand clapping, body slapping, foot patting, and dancing.⁵

All music begins with the body. The supreme instrument in every culture is also the oldest: the voice. The voice embodies tone, timbre, sonority, rhythm, messages, ideas, prayers, collective aspirations, and the call and response. Through the voice, Africans heard each other in languages familiar and foreign, in deep tones and pitch-bending falsetto. Because secular songs were generally sung beyond earshot of the master or overseer, their messages were often more explicit: “Run nigger run / the patter-roller get you …” and

Yes, my ole Masser promise me;

But “his papers” didn’t leave me free.

A dose of poison helped him along

May de Devil preach his funeral song …

Not every song was a call to arms, nor did every song carry a hidden message for runaways. Song as expression of a vision of freedom meant that the everyday challenges of living life, loving, raising children, burying the dead, honoring ancestors, and obeying God took precedence over the routinized oppression of slavery. Enslaved Africans were not always obsessed with slave power when they had other powers to contend with—spiritual and magical powers. Christianity did not become the dominant religion among enslaved Africans until the nineteenth century. Nearly half of the Africans transported to North America during the slave trade came from areas where Islam was practiced, particularly in the Senegambia region. By one estimate, almost a quarter of a million Africans brought to the US were Muslim. Ancestor divination and the ritualized use of certain substances, spells, and incantations were also fairly common well into the nineteenth century.⁶

By 1830, most Black people—enslaved and free—embraced Christianity but not the gospel according to the master. The official plantation preachers’ admonitions on slavery as God’s will, submission as a virtue, “theft” as sin, and the desire for liberty as the devil’s work fell upon deaf ears. Black people turned Christianity into a prophetic theology of liberation. Masters were the sinners; the enslaved God’s children and the true believers. The Bible consistently sided with the oppressed and the poor, and the God of the Old Testament had no qualms about employing redemptive violence to purge the land of sin. The enslaved anchored their beliefs in Matthew 20:16: “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” In the story of Exodus, where Black people identified with the flight of Jews out of Egypt. In Psalm 68, verse 31: “Princes come out of Egypt. Ethiopia stretches forth her hands unto God.” In the idea of “Jubilee” outlined in Leviticus chapter 25, which not only promises the periodic return of land to divine authority (“the land is mine, and you are coming into it as aliens and settlers”) and the cancellation of all debt, but the freeing of slaves. Rebels such as Denmark Vesey, the free Black carpenter executed in 1822 for planning a massive slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, found the clearest expression of Jubilee in Isaiah 61:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me

Because the Lord has anointed me;

He has sent me to bring good news to the humble,

To bind up the broken-hearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to those in prison;

To proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor and a day of vengeance of our God.

Black people expressed this radical prophetic Christian vision in song, most famously in “Go Down, Moses,” in which Moses threatened to kill the first-born child of the Egyptian pharaoh if he did not free the Israelites. But themes of violence and vengeance appeared less frequently than prophecy and deliverance—which is to say, visions of a post-slavery world or “next world.” Songs such as “No More Auction Block for Me,” “Children, We Shall Be Free,” “This World Almost Done,” “O Brothers, Don’t Get Weary,” “We’ll Soon Be Free/My Father, How Long?,” and “I Want to Go Home” employed metaphors of heaven or judgment day to speak of emancipation or escape, as in this example:

There’s no rain to wet you

O, yes I want to go home

There’s no sun to burn you

O yes, I want to go home….

There’s no hard trials….

There’s no whips-a-crackin….

However, “I Want to Go Home” and “We’ll Soon Be Free/My Father, How Long?” were collected by the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson during his command of an all-Black regiment during the Civil War.⁷ Higginson was already a legend in abolitionist circles, having participated in militant efforts to protect fugitives from re-enslavement and helping fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. On the battlefield and in the contraband camps, the people he encountered were no longer slaves, and their songs reflected this new reality as well as their determination to remain free. These were the people who had waged what the eminent scholar W. E. B. Du Bois called the “General Strike” that brought down the Confederacy—the escapees who saw war as the opportunity to seize their freedom and confront their masters on the field of battle. These were the Black men who donned the Union blue to bring an end to human bondage. “The Enlisted Soldiers, or The Negro Battle Hymn,” “The Year of Jubalo (Kingdom Comin’),” and “Old Massa, He Come Dancin’ Out,” all included here, are examples of these new Civil War-era freedom songs. The future they imagined, the next world, had arrived, and what they sang in these military camps marked a decisive break from the plantation. The great jazz musician Sidney Bechet captures this change in his memoir, Treat It Gentle:

It was years they’d been singing [“Go Down, Moses”]. And suddenly there was a different way of singing it. You could feel a new way of happiness in the lines. All that waiting, all that time when that song was far-off music, waiting music, suffering music; and all at once it was there, it had arrived. It was joy music now. It was Free Day … Emancipation.⁸

SONGS OF ABOLITION

Songs of Slavery and Emancipation is unique for bringing together the music of the enslaved with what has come to be known as the abolitionist songbook. These repertoires are usually treated as discrete bodies of music—the former the veiled expression of the enslaved, the latter popular ditties and hymns composed for the purposes of mobilizing antislavery sentiment. But Manisha Sinha’s keen observation suggests the line demarcating slave songs from abolitionist songs may not be so sharp.⁹ Abolition begins with the slave rebellion, and as Mat Callahan demonstrates, some of the earliest examples of antislavery songs were accounts celebrating insurrections or conspiracies. Included in this collection are rare songs bearing titles such as “Rebeldia na Bandabou,” “Uncle Gabriel, the Negro General,” “The Dirge of St. Malo,” “Recognition March of the Independance of Hayti,” “The African Hymn,” “Nat Turner,” and “March On.”

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Discovery and Authentication
• Part II: Lyrics
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526–1860 (1939)
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author