CHAPTER 9 | SPIRITUALS AND THEIR COLLECTORS: FROM CONTRABAND TO CONCERT HALL 225
left a deep impression. “They have a prime deliverance melody, that runs in this
style,” he wrote in his fi rst report: “ ‘Go down to Egypt— / Tell Pharaoh / Thus
saith my servant, Moses— / Let my people go.’ Accent on the last syllable, with
repetition of the chorus, that seems every hour to ring like a warning note in the
ear of despotism.”
Lockwood’s report was published in October 1861 in a Northern abolition-
ist newspaper. In December, the same paper printed a twenty-stanza transcrip-
tion of “Let My People Go: A Song of the ‘Contrabands’” in standardized English.
“The following curious hymn,” the notice reported, came from Lockwood, who
had taken down the text “verbatim” from contraband dictation. Before the year
was out, a sheet music version of “Go Down, Moses” was advertised for sale. The
printed circulation of spirituals had begun.
During the war and for some time after, the dissemination of these African
American religious songs rooted in the experience of slavery depended on white
advocates like Lockwood, who were eager to document the spirituality and
creativity of African Americans. Therefore, the story of how spirituals moved
beyond slave communities is revealed chiefl y in the black singers’ interaction
with Northern white clergymen and teachers. W hite foes of slavery took the
spirituals as evidence of the slaves’ human capacity and their fi tness to live as
free Americans. In the struggle against slavery and its aftermath, “Go Down,
Moses” and other spirituals signaled the involvement of Southern black people
in what was to be a long campaign for equality.
Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867), collected and published by
William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, is the
fi rst of many anthologies in which black spirituals are preserved. It was the work
of three Northern antislavery activists who worked during the Civil War to edu-
cate freed slaves on the Sea Islands near Port Royal, South Carolina. Before arriv-
ing at Port Royal, Massachusetts natives Allen and Ware had known little of black
Americans or their music, but their duties gave them contact with both. Allen
taught in a freedmen’s school for more than eight months (1863–64), and Ware,
his cousin, worked as a plantation superintendent on an island off the coast of
South Carolina that had been liberated by the Union Army (1862–65). Garrison
was the most accomplished musician of the three. Born in Philadelphia, she was
a pianist and violinist who by age fi fteen was giving piano lessons. The scholarly
expertise behind Slave Songs was chiefl y Allen’s; Ware supplied the largest num-
ber of transcriptions, while Garrison—with help from her husband, the literary
editor of the staunchly abolitionist magazine The Nation—collected and edited
transcriptions and saw the work through the press.
Slave Songs contains 136 melodies with texts, arranged geographically. The
introduction admits that the published melodies “convey but a faint shadow
of the original,” for the singers’ infl ections “cannot be reproduced on paper.”
Encountering a culture profoundly different from their own, the compilers still
recognized it as a culture and worked to set down this repertory of “old songs . . .
before it is too late,” knowing that the songs’ associations with slavery were
making black people reluctant to sing them. The spirituals distinguished them-
selves from white hymnody in the precedence given to rhythm. “The negroes
keep exquisite time in singing,” Allen wrote, “and do not suffer themselves to
be daunted by any obstacle in the words.” This comment is an early example of
a principle later termed cultural relativism, which refuses to make cultural dif-
ference a measure of quality in either direction.“Let My People Go”Slave Songs of the
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