Introduction

The Lords of Sounds

At day’s end the slaves trudged home from their owners’ fields. Since sunup they had worked and sweated for the man. Now, for a few hours of darkness, the time was theirs, to the extent that slaves ever owned anything, and they could be something other than brute physical labor. Small groups gathered outside the slave cabins, listening to stories, talking out of earshot of the overseer.Maybe later, particularly if it happened to be a Saturday, there would be singing, and someone might accompany them on a banjo or a fiddle. At a distance, the quarters gave off an industrious hum, reassuring proof to those up in the Big House of the rightness of the plantation order, but from within what the slaves could hear were the invigorating sounds of the reclamation of their humanity. As she often did, Zora Neale Hurston put it best: this was the time of day when blacks “became lords of sounds.”1 There is something timeless about such a scene. It could be a Virginia tobacco plantation in the 1750s, a South Carolina rice plantation in the 1810s, or a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta in the 1850s. Indeed, replace the overseer with the boss man, allow that the blacks did legally own their own time, and this vignette could just as easily be set in the Florida of the 1910s or 1920s that Hurston knew so well. For nearly three centuries of African American history, much of what was distinctive about black culture was to be found in the realm of sound, a characteristic that was particularly clear in the hours in which slaves were not toiling for their owners.

Above all else, slave culture was made to be heard. That was apparent from the moment newly enslaved Africans first arrived in the New World. It is difficult to get at the experiences of the fresh arrivals as they struggled to comprehend their status as slaves in a new and bewildering land. Hardly surprisingly, they left scant records of those experiences; practically all we have are a few descriptions by uncomprehending whites, mostly couched in terms of the impenetrability of the behavior of their newly imported property.2 But occasionally the incidents whites describe are so striking, the behavior of blacks so apparently strange, that we are afforded some insight into the slaves’ reactions to what must have seemed a terrifying and almost impossibly alien world.

In 1786 the brig Camden unloaded its cargo of eighty West African males at Edenton Harbor, North Carolina. This was unusual on two counts. Firstly, very few shipments of African slaves had come directly to that colony; most arrived via the Chesapeake or Charleston. Secondly, the importers, Josiah Collins and two partners of the Lake Company, needed the slaves not to work a plantation but to dig the canals that would drain the swamps around Phelps Lake in Washington County on the south of Albemarle Sound. Eventually, these acres, reclaimed by African sweat and blood, would constitute one of the largest plantations in North Carolina, but for that to happen the swamps needed to be emptied, and the principals of the Lake Company believed that Africans, fresh off the boat and unseasoned, were best suited to this arduous task.

Conditions were horrendous. Digging canals was the most dangerous, unhealthy, debilitating, and exhausting work inflicted on American slaves. For much of their waking hours, these “new negroes,” as they were called, were waist deep in the muck of the North Carolina swamp, continually chivied by mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers, always alert for steel-gray cottonmouths, copperheads, and rattlers, toiling in what seemed a never-ending task. Years later, William Trotter, the Lake Company’s overseer, recalled that “many of the Africans succumbed under this work.” The use of the term “succumbed” here almost shifts the blame for the deaths to the Africans themselves, but Trotter did go on to admit that “when [the company’s slaves] were disabled they would be left by the bank of the canal, and the next morning the returning gang would find them dead.” As each day drew to a close and fading light made more work impossible, the unfortunate slaves were marched back to cabins on the shore of Phelps Lake for a few hours respite. In his own matter-of-fact way the overseer recounted what had then transpired:

At night they would begin to sing their native songs, and in a short while would become so wrought up that, utterly oblivious to the danx ger involved, they would grasp their bundles of personal effects, swing them on their shoulders, and setting their faces towards Africa would march down into the water singing as they marched till recalled to their senses only by the drowning of some of the party.

Apparently, such scenes were witnessed more than once. Confronted by what can fairly be described as a hell on earth, worked to the point of collapse, tormented by strange men barking orders in an incomprehensible language, these Africans, it seems, found some semblance of solace by immersing themselves in the familiar sounds of their homeland. And if, to a group of slaves stranded on the shores of an American lake, the first refrain or two they sang seemed to them absurdly out of place, gradually the resonance of the music’s pulse and the reassuring texture of their own words transported them to a place where something other than their appalling conditions mattered. That, looking longingly toward Africa and swayed by the power of their own music, a few desperate Africans chose to fall back on their belief that the dead returned to the country of their birth, and to kill themselves, should come as no surprise. Nor should it shock us that those who controlled the Lake Company, aware that their slaves’ desire to spite them was at least a factor in their suicides, quickly picked up on the rudiments of the culture of their property and banned them from their “evening singing.”3

If the Lake Company’s owners and employees were able to find at least some cultural meaning in the unfamiliar sounds of their slaves’ music, others were less comprehending. While out walking in New Orleans on a Sunday afternoon in 1819, the architect and engineer Benjamin Latrobe suddenly heard a “most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse Mill, the horses trampling on a wooden floor.” Following the sound to its source, Latrobe came upon an area of open ground adjacent to the city, on which some five or six hundred blacks were “formed into circular groupes in the midst of four of which . . . was a ring.”Within these rings, slave instrumentalists were playing while African Louisianans danced. The sounds emanating from the dancing rings at Congo Square, as this open area near the city had become known, evoked in Latrobe an overwhelming sense of cultural alienation. The drumming was “abominably loud”; the singing “uncouth” and “detestable.” “I have never,” the traveler announced, “seen any thing more brutally savage, and at the same time dull and stupid than this whole exhibition.”4

For all of, or perhaps because of, Latrobe’s revulsion, Congo Square was an extraordinary place, a site where the sheer din of several hundred sensuous black bodies moving to an unforgiving beat compelled even the most unthinking white onlooker to acknowledge that the people they casually thought of as slaves had an African past. Some four decades later another sojourner in New Orleans strolled through Congo Square on a fine Sunday afternoon, watching and listening to the performances. What caught James R. Creecy’s ear was the sheer variety of sounds, from the harsh through to the dulcet, produced by the slave and free black musicians and dancers. Not only were “banjos, tom-toms, violins, jawbones, triangles, and various other instruments” all being played at once, but it was also the case that the bells and shells attached to the dancers arms and legs jingled “a second or counter to the music most sweetly.” Music and dance had bled into one another to the point where they were inseparable. “In all their movements, gyrations and attitudenizing exhibitions, the most perfect time is kept, making the beats with the feet, heads or hands, or all, as correctly as a well-regulated metronome!” For most onlookers, this was a rather different conception of how music was made, and Creecy was well aware of the educative function of the performances at the “celebrated Congo Square.” By the time of the Civil War, the spectacle was sufficiently familiar and sufficiently well anticipated not to shock, as it had Latrobe, but still strange enough “to amuse and astonish, interest and excite, the risibles and wonder” of those, particularly travelers, who were “unskilled in Creole or African manners and customs.”5

It is important to realize, though, that the sounds of slavery were hardly confined to music, and that the distinctive aural features of African American culture permeated everyday life in British mainland North America and later the United States. In the years before the Civil War, Americans, especially those living in the South, continually heard, or overheard, the voices of Africans and African Americans talking. To be sure, in some extreme cases nervous whites did wish to silence slaves, at times quite literally. A Dr. C.G. Parsons, touring southern plantations in the mid-1850s, described for his readers a device made of pieces of iron and leather that, when fitted, rendered its wearer dumb. Parsons had seen this gag on a slave preacher, who, despite all manner of threats and punishments, had continued to preach at night in the woods, causing great religious excitement among the slaves. Finally, the errant slave had been taken to the local blacksmith and gagged, after which procedure “he could not speak a word.”6 In another instance, in Adams County, Mississippi, in December 1857, when three slaves were about to be put to death for the murder of an overseer, a local dignitary worried about the details of the hanging. On the one hand, it was essential that local slaves knew that their compatriots were dead, that they had not been quietly sold away. On the other hand, the official wanted to avoid a situation in which the slaves were “brought out in public to be hung and they get up and talk out that they are prepared to die—that they have got religion, and are ready to go home to heaven &c &c.”Wary of the verbal prowess of the malefactors, the white Mississippian continued to ruminate that perhaps the slaves “could be hung publickly and not allowed to talk any.”7

More usually, though, the white ideal of the plantation soundscape was one not of silence, but of quietude. Describing his sojourn in the region near Natchez, Mississippi, in the early 1830s, Joseph Ingraham paused briefly to reflect on the nature of plantation life. “No scene,” the New England–born traveler intoned, “can be livelier or more interesting to a Northerner, than that which the negro quarters of a well regulated plantation present, on a Sabbath morning, just before church hour.” In the free time available to them, slaves were dressing up, combing and styling their hair, and “quietly conversing” outside the doors of their cabins.8 There is little doubt, however, that the quiet conversations had a different meaning for the Mississippian slaves than for the New England traveler watching from a distance on a fleeting visit to the plantation.

Hardly surprisingly, the recovery of such conversations is difficult, but some of the interviews recorded with former slaves by employees of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s suggest something of what they meant to African Americans. Clara Young, enslaved in Alabama, told how, after supper in the quarters following a long day’s work, “we’d set ’round and sin’ an talk.”9 Green Cumby explained that “at night the slaves would gather roun’ the cabins in little bunches and talk ’til bed time.”10 Slaves chatted about the weather, the fishing, and the way their vegetables were doing. They gossiped about slaves on neighboring properties and on their own plantation, and about what the whites were doing, and on occasion they fulfilled their owners’ nightmares and talked of running away, burning down haystacks, and of wreaking a horrible vengeance on the overseer and other hated whites. Mostly, though, what we know about are the Brer Rabbit and other animal trickster stories, tall tales, and, a subject of particular concern to many of the WPA interviewers, the stories about “haunts.” In response to his interviewer’s questions, James Southall remembered slaves gathering at someone’s cabin to tell ghost stories.11 Arrie Binns, born on a Georgia plantation about 1850, easily recalled how, more than eight decades previously, he had been terrified by some of the stories told to him. “Nigger chilluns was allus skeered to go in the woods arter dark. Folkses done told us Raw- Head-and-Bloody-Bones lived in the woods and git little chilluns and eat ’em up effen they got in the woods atter dark.”12 On paper, the dialect that employees of the New Deal’s WPA used to transcribe former slaves’ words is clumsy, conveying little of the fluent inventiveness of African American speakers, and of the verbal pyrotechnics as gifted raconteurs told their lies, artful performances that would cause Zora Neale Hurston to dub them “lords of sounds.”

Some of the clearest examples of the different way in which African Americans and whites used language came from black preachers, archetypes of the black man-of-words. In August 1823, an anonymous Glaswegian attended a Methodist camp meeting in Westchester County. Such gatherings, often of several thousand people, were a commonplace in the immediate vicinity of New York City in the 1820s; some were attended only by blacks, both slave and free, others, as with the one in Westchester County, attracted both black and white believers or seekers after religious truth. After recounting at considerable length details of what the whites were doing, the Scotsman related how he had heard a “prodigious noise” coming “from the bottom of the camp, where the blacks were assembled.” Caught up in the throng of whites moving in the direction of the commotion, he eventually “got within sight of a black orator who was standing on the stump of an old tree, and expounding with great vehemence and invective.” The preacher railed at his audience, telling them that “they need not expect to get to heaven with their upright backs and starched strict necks for they must bow, and carry the cross on their backs.” Here, to render his image palpable, the black man picked up “a huge chair” and “placed it over his shoulder.” As the bemused, but fascinated, onlooker noted, the “chair became the topic of illustration, its weight was discussed, then with outstretched arms it was flourished in the heavens, to show how it would be glorified and draw up those who carried it to heaven.” The drama of this performance, not just the language the preacher used but the way his entire body was caught up in the delivery of the sermon, was eliciting starkly different reactions from his racially mixed audience. Whites were laughing openly at the preacher’s “shouting and mechanical sermonizing,” which “was the sport of all around.” By contrast, his “negro auditors,” tears of joy streaming down their faces, were shouting out “God be praised!” and “Glory! Glory!”13

The distinctiveness of the sounds of African American culture may have been most obvious in the hours in which slaves were not toiling for their owners, but it was also clear enough as they went about their daily work. In any consideration of slave life it is important to look at the culture from the inside out, from the place where the slaves were most in control of their destinies to the place where they were under the direct thrall of their overseer or owner. Most of the waking hours of slaves were spent working—that, after all, was the reason for their enslavement—and there is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that slaves did not view work as a quiet and solitary endeavor. In their working hours, perhaps, the slaves were no longer quite the lords of sounds, circumscribed as they were by whites, whose presence made the slaves somewhat more sly in the way they expressed themselves. But it was still the case that, for example, slaves accompanied seemingly every type of possible work with song, and did so in such a distinctive and unusual fashion that it continually evoked comments from whites who heard it.14

One afternoon, while resident on Butler Island in the Altamaha River, Georgia, in the 1830s, Fanny Kemble, best known as one of the leading actresses of the nineteenth century, ventured down to the river to see her plantation-owning husband off on a brief trip to nearby Saint Simons Island. As the boat was pushed off, the eight slave oarsmen began pulling and “set up a chorus, which they continued to chant in unison with each other, and in time with their stroke, till the voices and oars were heard no more from the distance.” Kemble was somewhat condescending toward the singing of her husband’s slaves—their tunes were invariably plagiarized from those of their owners, she believed, and the new lyrics were “astonishingly primitive”— but even she was forced to concede that the “tune and time” kept by the oarsmen and other slaves singing in unison was “something quite wonderful.” And that precision of course was the point— the slaves Kemble watched and heard relied on the beat of their work songs to pace their work.15 Other travelers made similar comments.A decade and a half before Kemble set foot in Georgia,William Faux, an English farmer, noticed, in Charleston Harbor, the “galley-slaves all singing songs in chorus, regulated by the motion of their oars.” Faux also noted that the men made up their own lyrics “either in praise or satire” of “kind or unkind masters,” before concluding that “the music was barbarously harmonious.”16

Throughout British mainland North America and later the United States, whenever slaves were compelled to labor at repetitive, invariably boring, jobs, they preferred to do so to the beat of their songs, in much the same fashion as their African parents and grandparents had done. Not only did slaves row boats as they sang their songs, they also planted tobacco, chopped cotton, swung axes, scrubbed clothes on the washboard, and performed innumerable other tasks. One former slave remembered that “I used to pick 150 pounds of cotton every day,” a figure that conjures up images of torn and bleeding hands and hours and hours of backbreaking monotony. She then quickly added that “We would pick cotton and sing, pick and sing all day,” which suggests, perhaps, one of the ways slaves made the labor endurable.17

Work songs were hardly restricted to the plantation South. Every year in American ports, north and south, tens of thousands of ships’ cargoes were loaded and unloaded by African Americans to a deepvoiced musical accompaniment. According to one visitor, not even Liverpool could match the bustle and hustle of the levee in New Orleans from November to July. The only thing that could “drown the noise of singing negroes” was the “fearful roaring and screeching” of one of the steamboats docking, or setting off back up the Mississippi River.18 Unlikely as it may seem to us today, at least some black factory hands also sang as they worked. In a Richmond tobacco factory, eighty black boys “from the age of twelve years up to manhood” rolled and pressed tobacco plugs and sang psalms at the same time. The owner encouraged the practice as much as possible because “the boys work better while singing.”19

Some of the most distinctive sounds made by slaves were not easily categorized, being neither speech nor music but more howl or shout. On October 18, 1821, before a crowd of some seven hundred whites and fifteen hundred blacks, the sheriff of Princess Anne, in Somerset County, Maryland, executed Jenny, a seventy-year-old African American woman. Seconds before Jenny was hung, “several hundreds of the colored people” turned their backs to the gallows, squatted on the ground, “covered their faces with their hands, and uttered a simultaneous groan, which while it expressed their feelings, added not a little to the horror of the scene.”20 In June 1820 William Faux, sojourning among the plantations along the South Carolina coast, reported in his diary that close to sunset there “suddenly burst upon my ear an earth-rending shout. It proceeded from negroes shouting three times three, on finishing their task.”21 To many whites, the fact that slaves sang while they worked seemed unusual enough, but these strange, guttural cries were even more unsettling. As far as the onlookers were concerned, these were disconcertingly primitive sounds far removed from their own culture.

The singing of slaves in their brush arbors on plantations, or while chopping weeds in the cotton fields or at a corn shucking or some other type of frolic; the sound of a slave preacher delivering a sermon, or of a pair of blacks exchanging greetings on a New York City street, or of an elderly slave telling Brer Rabbit stories to children; the hollers and cries that punctuated the southern countryside, and even the screams of a slave as the lash bit into her or his skin—all these and many more made up the sounds of slavery, sounds whose deeper cultural meanings this study shall endeavor to explore. Beyond that, our book is an attempt to show how sounds and understandings, whose roots lay deep in the slaves’ African homelands, collided with Euro- American musical and speech forms, to create something new. There are a couple of major problems involved in attempting to recover these sounds of slavery. One is the extent to which African and African American culture have shaped the sounds of American culture. Perhaps this is best illustrated by the example of the blues. One night in the early years of last century, probably in 1904, a train delay forced the black musician W. C. Handy to idle away several hours in Tutwiler railway station, deep in the Mississippi Delta. Handy, then the director of the Knights of Pythias band in Clarksdale, was dozing when, as he later put it, “Life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.” A lanky black man, dressed in rags, toes poking out of his shoes, had sat down and started “plunking a guitar.” As he played, he pressed a knife against the strings, creating a sound that was “unforgettable.” Three times he sang “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” all the while “accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.” When asked for an explanation, the bemused black man explained to Handy that the line meant he was going to Moorhead, where the north-south and eastwest rail lines crossed each other. The reason the tune stayed in Handy’s mind, though, lay not in the meaning of the line but in its distinctive and repetitive sound. This incident, which conceivably never happened, is one of the myths of the origins of the blues, a story that sets up an encounter between the sophisticated and technically trained Handy and the vernacular music of ordinary African Mississippians that soon resulted in the commercial form of the blues.

Within a few years, the sound that had struck Handy as weird would be known across black America, and nowadays, for example, very few readers of this book would not be familiar with the sound of either a slide guitar or the blues. Indeed, today the guitarist is more likely to be an Eric Clapton, born in Surrey, England, than a black from the Delta. The very success and consequent familiarity of black culture continually threatens to distort our understanding of the sounds of slavery. Part of what we are endeavoring to do in this book, then, is to restore the “pastness” of past sounds, to recover some of the shock value that those sounds would have had for eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury whites who heard them, the kind of shock that W. C. Handy experienced as he listened to the black Mississippian’s “weird” and “unforgettable” music.22

The other major problem involved in writing about the history of sound is that of sources. Seemingly left with only printed and manuscript pages, how effectively can we recover anything of slavery’s sounds? Frederick Douglass, easily the most famous survivor of the horrors of the “peculiar institution,” was well aware of the strangeness, to whites, of “apparently incoherent” slave musical sounds, even as he urged whites to attempt to understand their “deep meanings.” Douglass was alluding here not to the lyrics of the songs but to the “wild notes” of the singers, the “tones, loud, long and deep,” every one of which constituted “a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” Those who wished “to be impressed with a sense of the soul-killing power of slavery,” Douglass suggested, should “go to Col. Lloyd’s [Douglass’s Maryland owner’s] plantation, and, on allowance day,” as the slaves, singing all the while, passed by on their journey to collect their rations, “place [themselves] in the deep, pine woods, and there . . . in silence, thoughtfully analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of [their] soul.”23 Unfortunately, of course, we cannot take Douglass’s advice. But every now and again, we have come across the writings of someone who has, metaphorically at least, stood in those woods and listened, an observer particularly attuned to the sonic world. Perhaps the best example is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an idealistic New England abolitionist, who took command of the First Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers, the Union’s first black military unit, and who possessed an unusual sensitivity to sound. Higginson’s memoir, Army Life in a Black Regiment, and the diary and the letters to his wife and mother on which it is based, is saturated with detailed and sharply observed depictions of the strange and intriguing soundscape of black camp life. On one of his “evening strolls among my own camp fires,” Higginson came upon black soldiers “telling stories & shouting with laughter over the broadest mimicry,” mimicry in which the unit’s white officers were “not always spared.” Somewhere in the distance “the everlasting ‘shout’” was under way, “with its mixture of piety & polka.” And here and there “quieter prayer meetings” were in progress, “with ardent & often touching invocations; & slower psalms deaconed out . . . by the leader. . . , in a wailing chant.” At one fire, men danced to the accompaniment of “a quite artistic fiddle.” At another, a “stump orator perched on his barrel, pour[ed] out his mingling of liberty & Methodism in quaint eloquence.”24 Details such as these eluded the ears of virtually every other observer of black military life. Higginson listened keenly not merely to this aural world of shouts and song, but to the ways his men spoke. Although disconcerted by certain peculiarities of syntax, he admired his troops’ ready eloquence, their striking use of imagery, their pithily expressed abstract thought, their sheer verbal facility and power. One night he heard one of his soldiers deliver a “perfectly thrilling” impromptu speech, which contained “the most impressive sentence about the American flag I ever heard,” a sentence he went on to render in dialect: Our mas’rs dey hab lib under de flag, dey got dere wealth under it, & ebery ting beautiful for dere chil’en & under it dey hab grind us into money & put us in dere pocket; & dat minute dey tink dat ole flag mean freedom for us dey pull it down & run up de rag ob dere own; but we’ll nebber desert it boys, nebber; we hab lib under it for 1862 years (!!!) & we’ll die for it now.

Higginson doubted that any of his officers “could have spoken on the spur of the moment with such easy eloquence and such telling effect.”25 Again and again, the New Englander would be struck by his men’s verbal inventiveness, their ability to invest images drawn from everyday life with deep and pertinent meaning. In August 1863, as he left the regiment for a twenty-day furlough to recover from war wounds, Higginson was especially touched when a soldier told him: “You’s a mighty big rail out ob de fence, sa.”26

Yet for every Higginson or William Francis Allen and the other compilers of Slave Songs of the United States (1867), there were scores if not hundreds of observers journeying through the South who were seemingly oblivious to, or laconically dismissive of, all that they heard.27 And even had these travelers been as aurally sensitive as we might wish, there is the obvious problem that sound does not reduce well to the printed page. There is, however, another possible source. As part of the documentary impulse of the 1930s, a number of collectors, most notably John and Alan Lomax, traveled through the South, recording all manner of African American sounds for the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. The fruits of these collecting trips are still deposited in the Library of Congress. In an attempt to illustrate more clearly the nature and meaning of African American sounds, we have included examples of field calls, work songs, spirituals, prayers, and sermons, on the compact disc that is packaged with this book. In most cases, items selected for the CD were recorded in the 1930s and are held by the library’s Archive of Folk Culture.

The African Americans whom the Lomaxes auditioned and then recorded on what John Lomax called their “portable-machine for electrical sound-recording”28—on the 1933 trip the machine weighed 350 pounds—were the children and grandchildren of slaves. Unlike earlier collectors, whose transcriptions of performances depended on the transcriber’s skill and judgment, the Lomaxes relied on technology to secure what they believed was the unmediated original. After one field trip, John Lomax described the 150 tunes with which he had returned as “sound photographs of Negro songs, rendered in their own element, unrestrained, uninfluenced and undirected by anyone who has had his own notions of how the songs should be rendered.” But like the photographs to which Lomax compared his recordings, they contain ambivalences. Recordings, too, can strike a pose. For even though the Lomaxes used machines, they saw themselves as being in pursuit of subjects whom modernity had passed by. And this vision, in turn, shaped both their journeys and the sounds they enshrined. In search of an older, more “authentic” African American culture—in our terms, one closer to the time of slavery—the Lomaxes rummaged through the “eddies of human society” in remote cotton plantations, lumber camps, and, most famously, segregated southern prisons. Part of the reason they were so excited by their “discovery” of the talent of Leadbelly was that they felt that the great blues singer’s “eleven years of confinement had cut him off both from the phonograph and from the radio”—the fact that Leadbelly felt otherwise was beside the point.29 What is exciting about listening to the material from the field trips into the South of the 1930s is that the folk artists whose voices one hears reveal ways of singing and talking that had been heard from the lips of former slaves. It most definitely is not as though a tape recorder had been left on in the woods near the plantation on which Frederick Douglass toiled as a slave, but these recordings bring us about as close as we are ever going to get to hearing some of the familiar— and to white ears often “weird” and “unforgettable”—sounds of slavery.