152 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
Singers, a quartet made up of brothers Judson, John, and Asa and
their young sister Abby, launched a career as a touring ensemble.
Their travels, beginning in New England, took them down the
Eastern Seaboard to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington,
where in 1844 they sang at the W hite House for President John
Tyler. In 1845–46 they performed in the British Isles, then returned
and continued to tour the United States. Their heyday came to an
end in 1849 when Abby married and left the troupe.
Entering a fi eld dominated by foreign musicians, the Hutchin-
sons stressed their American origins. They seemed to play them-
selves onstage: members of a small-town New England family. A
New York critic in 1843 praised their singing as “simple, sweet,
and full of mountain melody.”
The Hutchinsons’ first reform-minded goal was to help
reduce American consumption of alcohol, which in 1830 stood
at nearly three times the per capita rate measured in 1975.
During the 1830s reformers mounted an anti-drinking cam-
paign, connecting drink to poverty, immorality, lack of fam-
ily responsibility, and neglect of women and children. Their
campaign succeeded: by 1845 consumption had dropped to
one-fourth of what it had been in 1830. John Hutchinson took a nondrinking
pledge in 1841, and from that time forward the family made a point of staying
in temperance hotels when they toured. They also began early in their career
to include anti-drinking songs in their concerts, and a few were published
in sheet music form, helping to bring the message of sobriety into American
homes.
The Hutchinsons also plunged into the fi ght against slavery. In 1843 they
appeared at an antislavery rally in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, joining with leading
abolitionists, including ex-slave Frederick Douglass, who became a close friend.
According to one eyewitness, slavery that day found no more forceful foe than
the Hutchinson Family Singers. “Speechifying, even of the better sort,” he wrote,
“did less to interest, purify and subdue minds, than this irresistible Anti-Slavery
music.”
One of the group’s most effective rallying cries was “Get Off the Track!”
(LG 6.4), sung to the tune of “Old Dan
Tucker” and trading on that min-
strel song’s rough appeal. The sheet
music, published in 1844, billed the
piece as “a song for emancipation.”
W hen sung by the Hutchinsons, the
song’s impact could be overwhelm-
ing. An account written after the
New England Anti-Slavery Conven-
tion in May 1844 leaves the impres-
sion that their performance was
the emotional climax of the entire
event.
At the same time that “Get Off
the Track!” promoted antislav-
ery fervor in general, it also acted
more specifically as a campaignK From 1842 until sister
Abby married in 1849,
the Hutchinson Family
Singers toured the United
States and Great Britain,
entertaining and edifying
audiences with their songs.The Hutchinsons Sing at a Boston
Antislavery Rally, 1844A
nd when they came to that chorus-cry, that gives name to the
song, when they cried to the heedless pro-slavery multitude
that were stupidly lingering on the track, and the engine “Liberator”
coming down hard upon them, under full steam and all speed, the
Liberty Bell loud ringing, and they standing like deaf men right in its
whirlwind path, the way they cried “Get off the track,” in defi ance of
all time and rule, was magnifi cent and sublime.... It was the cry of
the people.In their own words
LG 6.4172028_06_132-161_r3_ko.indd 152 23/01/13 8:19 PM