SHANE WHITE, GRAHAM WHITE. The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. With CD. Boston, Mass.: Beacon. 2005. Pp. xxii, 241. $29.95.

Abstract

It has been too long since anyone has surveyed the broad sonic world of slavery, and we are fortunate that two such keen-eared historians have undertaken the task. This book complements and extends the last major work of its kind, Dena J. Epstein's Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977). Like Epstein, Shane White and Graham White mine a prodigious amount of primary material, but they move beyond Epstein's focus on music to encompass the enormous range of sounds slaves crafted and that marked their world. Celebrating that creativity, they provide a superb introduction to this aspect of the slave experience, and the enclosed eighteen-track CD is a bonus that allows us to listen in on some representative samples of the sounds slaves heard and made. “Above all else,” White and White note from the beginning, “slave culture was made to be heard” (p. ix). The authors consequently take as their “main objective” a desire “to reach an understanding of what those sounds meant to enslaved African Americans, and to whites who were within earshot” (p. 29). The text pursues this question through eight chapters and a brief epilogue, traveling across the broad sonic landscape of town and plantation. Along the way, we listen in on frolics and worksongs, plantation bells and equipment, musical instruments and vocal virtuosity, sermons and hymns, dialect stories and jokes, street criers and vendors, and a host of other sounds that formed the sonic space of Africans in America. Yet the analysis does more than merely sample these different expressive cultures. The authors insist that the world of sound was a place enslaved blacks created a refuge from oppression, an “alternative universe” from those who claimed their ownership (p. 93). In particular, the degree to which their New World noises were indebted to their African antecedents and aesthetic principles indicates how extensively the patchwork of sounds, scraps of noise, and the creation of aesthetic frames that “invited co-construction” were means by which the enslaved made the soundscape an area of cultural freedom (p. 64). Through their noises, White and White conclude, the enslaved “for a short time at least, claimed some portion of the plantation South as an African American place” (p. 15). In so doing, they laid the foundation for a broader African American culture that continued to buoy spirits not only through the dark days of slavery but into Jim Crow's lengthening shadow.