An Introduction to America’s Music

224 PART 2 | FROM THE CIVIL WAR THROUGH WORLD WAR I

campaign to shorten working hours, the following lyrics were published for

that melody in 1865:

Ye noble sons of toil,

W ho ne’er from work recoil,

Take up the lay;

Loud let the anthem’s roar

Resume from shore to shore,

Till Time shall be no more,

Eight hours a day.

Management was not the only target of the nineteenth-century labor press. In

1893 a Philadelphia journal parodied a famous hymn, Arthur Sullivan’s “Onward,

Christian Soldiers,” to attack Christian outreach. Here is the fi rst stanza of “Mod-

ern Missionary Zeal,” which reads like something out of the tumultuous 1960s:

Onward! Christian soldiers;

On to heathen lands!

Prayer book in your pockets,

Rifl es in your hands.

Take the happy tidings

W here trade can be done;

Spread the peaceful gospel

With a Gatling gun.

Thoughts like these proceeded from what amounted to an underground press,

which attacked establishment beliefs. Labor songs thus reveal another face of

American musical democracy: one that, rather than affi rming the established

social order, gives it a critical look and invites citizens to imagine that it could

be otherwise. If European scholars had originated the idea that folk songs were

the communal expression of a timeless society, then American folk music, as it

developed in the nineteenth century, required extending that concept to include

songs that critiqued society.

With their political agenda, labor songs share a bond with Revolutionary-era

broadside ballads. But that bond is shared as well by a repertory that on its face

appears to be more concerned with spiritual salvation than economic and politi-

cal revolution. For the history of the African American spiritual is equally tied to

the political struggles of a formerly enslaved people.

SPIRITUALS AND THEIR COLLECTORS:

FROM CONTRABAND TO CONCERT HALL

Shortly after the Civil War began in April 1861, refugee slaves began seeking pro-

tection at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Their masters demanded the slaves’ return,

but the fort’s Union commander refused, calling them “contraband of war,” or

captured property. The now-freed blacks were put to work in the fort, but the

military could not provide them enough shelter or clothing. So in August the

American Missionary Association proposed a campaign of contraband relief,

and soon the Reverend Lewis C. Lockwood arrived at Fortress Monroe as mis-

sionary to the ex-slaves. Lockwood’s fi rst encounter with Southern black singing

songs of social critique

Lewis C. Lockwood

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