96 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR
The drummer’s repeated cry of Hi-a-bomba, bomba, bomba, creating a “full har-
mony” with the drum, suggests an approach to singing that is more rhythmic
than melodic. Moreover, the women who are not dancing repeat this cry, feed-
ing the rhythmic impulse further and illustrating the notion that African musi-
cians tend to approach singing as well as instrumental playing in a percussive
manner.GREATER VIRGINIA
In the mid-1700s the region known as Greater Virginia, which included parts
of today’s Maryland and North Carolina, was home to some 400,000 people, of
whom 35 to 40 percent were black. Except for the port of Baltimore, Greater Vir-
ginia lacked the cities that shaped the economy in the North; it was overwhelm-
ingly rural, with most of the population gathered around the rivers that were
used for shipping tobacco, the chief export crop. Though whites in the region
imposed one social identity upon blacks, blacks’ contact with each other was
strong enough to sustain another.
In the 1730s and 1740s a series of religious revivals known as the Great Awak-
ening swept the colonies from Maine to Georgia, making both clergy and slave
owners more inclined to consider slaves as potential Christians. By the 1750s the
Reverend Samuel Davies, a Presbyterian minister in Hanover, Virginia, could
point to success in his efforts to bring slaves into the Christian fold. “Ethiopia
has also stretched forth her Hands unto God,” Davies rejoiced in 1751. Congrega-
tional singing, he believed, helped attract slaves to his ministry. “The Negroes,”
he wrote, “above all the Human Species that I ever knew, have an Ear for Musick,
and a kind of extatic Delight in Psalmody.” A few years later, Davies again praised
the singing of black members of his congregation, who, “breaking out in a tor-
rent of sacred harmony,” could provide a sound powerful enough “to bear away
the whole congregation to heaven.”K In 1853 Lewis Miller
sketched this Negro dance
in Virginia, picturing stately
movements accompanied
by fi ddle, banjo, and bones.conversion to
Christianity172028_04_086-105_r2_vs.indd 96 23/01/13 10:07 AM