Judi Lutz Woods

During the winter, President Joan Larson opened the 12th regular meeting of the 2023-24 Shakespeare Club at her Fredonia home, with 18 members present. Secretary Lisa Mertz called the roll, then read the minutes from the previous meeting. Following the business meeting, Judi Lutz Woods presented her paper on Slave Songs.

From the backdrop of horrific conditions, brutal loss, abuse, and tragedy, American slaves created one of the most poignant American musical genres, that of the slave song, often referred to as jubilees, sorrow songs, and spirituals. Gospels, blues, jazz, and yes even hip hop and rap all have their roots in the songs the slaves sang as they worked, celebrated, worshiped, and planned escapes. The songs reflected the strong resilience of a people who refused to give up, their spirit to be free.

Forced to accept a new religion, Christianity, the slaves quickly related to the stories in The Bible. The stories told them how God had led the Israelites out of slavery to freedom. Since they were forbidden to learn to read or write, these songs were passed down orally. They might have all been lost if not for the efforts of those who found the songs unique and worthy of preservation. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a colonel in the Union Army devoted a full chapter in his book Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), to the songs the men sang around the campfire at night. The second is the book Slave Songs of the United States, the Classical 1867 Anthology by Lucy McKim Garrison, William Francis Allen, and Charles Pickard Ware. This book is still considered to be the authoritative resource on the songs slaves sang.

Following the battle of Port Royal Sound, 10,000 slaves found themselves free as the plantation owner fled to the mainland from the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina. About half of them joined the Union army, the rest turned to the Union army for support.

At this time Lucy traveled to the sea islands with her father Rev. James McKim, a Presbyterian minister who had been charged with gathering information on the newly freed slaves for the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Committee. Lucy was to act as her father’s secretary. Lucy was a 19 year old piano teacher and musicologist. After hearing the songs of the slaves, she was determined to capture the songs to put into musical notation and form.

The songs had three basic forms. Call and response, where the leader begins a question, and a chorus answers. The second form was the slow and melody, the songs with sustained expressive phrasing. Think of the song “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” The third form is fast and rhythmic, fun so to speak, like in the song “Shortnin’ Bread.” Many of the songs were in code for how and when to escape to freedom. Harriet Tubman became known as Moses, the Ohio River, Jordan, and Promised Land, Canada.

Even with the publication of the two books, the slave songs may have been lost forever if not for the Jubilee Singers from Fisk University in Nashville Tenn. The University had been created “to offer a liberal arts education to men and women irrespective of color.” However, in just five years the university faced severe financial hardship and was on the brink of closing when George L. White, a music professor and treasurer of the college, initiated a choral group. He called them the Jubilee singers and took them on tour. The group was able to earn about $150,000, roughly $3 million in today’s market, enough to save the university.

Frederick Douglas notes, “I have been utterly astonished since I came North to find a person who could speak of the singing among slaves as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are the most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart.” From that anguish turned into song, we have been given the songs of the slave. The songs gave us the evidence that you may be able to imprison the body but not the soul or spirit. It is the voice of an unwavering belief in humanity and a testament to an abiding faith in the ultimate triumph of good over systemic evil, a belief and hopes for a better future, one that in the words of Fredrick Douglas, “…men will judge men by their soul not by the color of their skin.