Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War

"'The songs of a slave are word-pictures of every thing he sees, or hears, or feels.'--John Dixon Long, a Philadelphia clergyman, 1857. The cacophony of clanking chains intruded upon the euphony of human song during the "Middle Passage" when--at the behest of ships' officers--slaves being transported to the Americas caused the overcrowded ships to echo with the sounds of dancing feet and harmonious voices. That scene is one of the first which Dena J. Epstein skillfully re-creates in her monumental work on the development and emergence of black folk music in the United States. From the plaintive tones of woe emanating from exiled kings and queens of Africa to the spirited worksongs and 'shouts' of freedmen, Epstein traces the course of early black folk music in all its guises. Her meticulous twenty-year search of diaries, letters, travel accounts, slave narratives, reports by plantation owners and ship captains, and other documents has uncovered a wealth of information on what Frederick Douglass called the 'tones loud, long and deep ... the prayer and complaints of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.' Epstein demonstrates that secular music--the music which evangelists denounced as 'sinful'--flourished among the exiled Africans to a much greater degree than has been recognized. 'Sinful tunes' and spirituals both were familiar to antebellum blacks. The author discusses the breakup of the closed plantation society which had isolated the slaves, and the introduction of the freedmen to the public at large via Slave Songs of the United States (1867), the first published collection of black music. The fascinating genesis of that seminal work is thoroughly covered, as is hitherto unknown information on the acculturation of African music in the New World, musical style, worksongs, religious music, and the Port Royal experiment (a wartime attempt to demonstrate that blacks could manage their own affairs). Epstein's research proves what many have long suspected: dancing and singing could--and did--coexist with forced labor and bitter suffering, providing slaves with the psychological escape that helped them to survive and to retain much of their cultural heritage."--Dust jacket.