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Slave Songs of the United States.
New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867. 8vo (9” x 6”), brown cloth, rebacked with original spine title laid down, gilt title at spine, covers ruled in blind. xliv, 115. Pasted-in portrait of T[homas]. W[entworth]. Higginson at p. xxxviii. Early ownership inscription at ffep: “C. M. Clark. 75. Haverhill, Mass., 3.7.’98.” CONDITION: Good, spine wrinkled, some wear to extremities, front paste-down a little stained, evidence of repair to inner hinges, contents good. First edition of this pioneering anthology of slave songs, collected and transcribed during the Civil War and published in order to elevate the musical genius of Black Americans and record “a state of society which has passed away.” The project was spearheaded by Lucy McKim Garrison, who at age nineteen began describing and transcribing the music she heard on the Sea Islands of South Carolina while helping her father, a Quaker abolitionist, organize aid to the recently-freed slaves there. She published the first slave songs that were accompanied with music, and continued the work after her marriage to Wendell Phillips Garrison (a son of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison), collaborating with Charles Pickard Ware—who transcribed numerous songs while serving as labor superintendent of freedmen in Port Royal, South Carolina during the war—and scholar William Francis Allen—who with his wife had run a school for emancipated slaves on the Sea Islands—in the publication of this volume. While most of the 136 songs collected here were gathered from the Sea Islands, the volume is organized by region and includes music from the “South Eastern Slave States,” the “Northern Seaboard Slave States,” the “Inland Slave States,” and the “Gulf States.” Many songs are annotated with variations, additional context, and so on. A scarce and pathbreaking compilation of African American music, published less than five years before the Fisk Jubilee Singers began performing on tour. REFERENCES: Afro-Americana 247; Blockson 9992 citing the 1929 edition; Weinstein 153.
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