Slave Songs of the United States

[Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, compilers and editors]

Published by A. Simpson & Co, New York, 1867

First edition. [2],xliv,[6],64,[2],65-82,[2],83-90,[93]-115pp. (as issued), including much printed music. 8vo. First edition of an eminently important and influential collection of slave songs published in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the first "systematic effort to collect and preserve" African-American spirituals. The text brings together 136 such songs, dividing them between regions: Southeastern ("South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands"), "Northern Seaboard Slave States" (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina), "Inland Slaves States: Including Tennessee, Arkansas, and the Mississippi River," and the Gulf States, including Florida and Louisiana. The index is even more specific as to the locality from which the song emanates, and occasional footnotes add considerable detail about the history of various songs, describe regional variations, and tell the stories of how the compilers came to learn them. The songs include phonetic renditions of now-famous titles such as "Roll, Jordan, Roll," "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had," and "Come Along, Moses," and conclude with seven songs in Creole ("negro-French") "obtained from a lady who heard them sung, before the war, on the 'Good Hope' plantation, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana." A lengthy preface, signed in print by editors and compilers William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, discusses the history and traditions of the songs and singing practice amongst the enslaved, and further provides an interesting and extensive grammatical and phonological analysis of Port Royal dialect. All three of the contributors to this volume came to work on the "Port Royal Experiment," during which time they communicated and recorded the majority of the present songs. The Experiment began less than a year after the first shots of the war, when the Union army occupied South Carolina's Sea Islands. The islands' entire enslaved population was freed, and given the opportunity to acquire their former masters' plantations and manage them personally. Missionaries and educators were brought in to create schools, and Port Royal was established as an independent community of free Blacks. The process was expanded even further in 1865, when Sherman ordered all of the land on the southeastern seaboard confiscated and sold or used to settle the Black refugees who had followed his army on their march to the sea. The experiment, though successful in proving that free Blacks could and would own, manage, and profit from their own plantations, proved short-lived; Andrew Johnson soon returned most of the confiscated lands to their White owners as part of his reconciliatory plan for Reconstruction. Allen ran a school for freedmen on the islands from 1863-4 before returning to work with refugees in Arkansas, Charles Pickard Ware was a civilian administrator for the Union Army on the island and transcribed many of the songs here personally, and Lucy McKim Garrison (who married William Lloyd Garrison's third son), was the daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist and came to the islands with her father. Garrison also published several of the songs in this volume individually a few years prior, which are considered the earliest "slave songs" printed with full musical scores. This collection is the first of what would become a profusion of attempts to "save" the art of the spiritual from extinction. Not unlike the myth of the "vanishing Indian," there was a popular conception (equally prevalent among the formerly enslaved) that the old "slave songs" would disappear entirely in the face of freedom, as free Blacks would naturally come around to White forms of singing and worship. "That these warnings and predictions were still being issued half a century later indicates that the old music did not die a sudden death.but there can be no doubt that the spirituals no longer occupied the position they had enjoyed in slavery. One observer after another attested to the fact that they. Seller Inventory # 373380

Bibliographic Details

Title: Slave Songs of the United States
Publisher: A. Simpson & Co, New York
Publication Date: 1867
Binding: Hardcover
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First edition.