Presented to the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music (March 12, 2022)

ABSTRACT

From the broadside ballads of Revolutionary era to the contrafacta made famous by the Hutchinson Family singers in the 1840s, the practice of writing new, timely, and often politically-oriented lyrics for a popular melody was well-established by the time Joshua Simpson authored and published his two collections of anti-slavery songs in the 1850s. He followed the practice not merely for convenience or efficiency, but to enhance the moral and political influences of the songs. While Simpson employed a variety of song types reflecting popular music of Antebellum America, chosen deliberately to reflect the mid-century expansion of the anti-slavery movement from its religious roots toward the arena of political activism and transatlantic cooperation, this paper focuses on Simpson’s clever manipulation of sentimentality in well-known popular ballads common to both parlors and minstrel stages. Simpson’s unique perspective as a Black activist with ties to the Underground Railroad in Ohio informs his use of song to move white Northerners toward sympathy for abolition. Historians remember Simpson primarily as a poet, but he is clearly a musician attentive to time and pitch organization, as evidenced by vivid text-painting that invokes two texts simultaneously. His original lyrics interject discomfort and pain into familiar music that nostalgically thematizes the comforts of home and human connections, forcing singers and listeners to reckon with enslaved people’s humanity and the inhumanity of slavery.