Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform. By Scott Gac. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv, 312 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11198-9.)

Abstract

Scott Gac's Singing for Freedom is a well-crafted study of one of the greatest musical acts in American history. The book provides a meticulous account of the rise and fall of the Hutchinson family singers, their role in antebellum reforms, and their creation of commercially viable protest music. The book would be a smashing success if it had accomplished only this, but it does so much more. It also provides a fresh look at the market revolution of the decades before the Civil War, sheds new light on the spread of the antislavery movement, and explains the emergence of a new and enduring form of protest. Gac is a gifted narrator. The book transports the reader to the time and place of Hutchinson performances. His accounts of the family's early performances in Boston, Albany, and New York City are particularly vivid, providing a wonderful feel for the cultural vibrancy of the 1840s. Singing for Freedom beautifully captures the dynamic relationship between city and country, and the role of popular entertainment in an emerging consumer culture. Gac explains well the market space that the Hutchinson singers carved out: a space bounded on one side by morally suspect blackface minstrelsy and on the other by noncommercial church music. The key to holding this space was the simultaneously pious and provocative reform messages of the family's music. Going to hear the “Tribe of Jessie” was an exciting event that members of a religious middle class, uncomfortable with city entertainments, could genuinely justify as an act of moral reform.