The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech

Abstract

The Australian historians Shane White and Graham White again break new ground in retrieving the experiences of African Americans and the white people among them during the period of enslavement. Building on their earlier premise by scrutinizing black American culture of that period by defining particular aspects of style, White and White dig deep into the oral testimony of the formerly enslaved, into contemporary writings of European Americans about African Americans, and into recordings of African Americans held in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. In the authors' previous book, Stylin': African American Expressive Culture, from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (1998), bodily adornment became the central example, but here the authors examine the styles of sounds, significantly comparing what they meant to the people making the sounds with what they meant to those outside the black communities. For more than 150 years, European Americans have written about black musical sounds. The earliest texts often negatively analyzed this music through comparisons with European music, particularly sacred sounds. As well, European Americans have given us books on such specific sound subjects as black sermons and the responding congregation's responsive noises and texts on black tales and folk beliefs. Meanwhile, European Americans produced noisy entertainments (presumedly drawing from black humor) beginning with minstrel shows in the late 1840s to radio's Amos 'n' Andy a hundred years later. In contrast to previous attempts that, with few exceptions, concern only one genre of sound making, White and White include all of those just mentioned and many others, resulting in a far more extensive and comprehensive examination of black styles.