Songs and the Slavery Landscape

Over the past three years one interest has been to connect the music of the American slavery experience with the physical landscape.  Like all such endeavors, the experience gained complexity as it went.  There were spirituals that related the Biblical landscape to the hills, mountains, valleys, rivers, and wilderness of the American south.  Old spirituals like "Go in De Wilderness" express a connectedness to God, a rite of self-determination, and a geo-physical sanctuary away from the hardships of the fields and plantations.  Having hiked and driven through many stretches of the south, these regions of wilderness sit at the periphery of all plantation life.  There are forests, swamps, bayous, hills, and caves that could, for as short as a moment or as long as a winter season, harbor the slave away from their heartbreaking realities.

A cotton field near Greenwood, Mississippi after fall harvest in 2011.  175 years
ago this region was thick hardwood forest and spotted with bayous.  The massive
land-clearing endeavor which rid the lands of nearly all flora and fauna in
order to make way for the southern Cotton Empire was performed using
slave labor.

As music is concerned, the various forms that the slaves adopted, modified - and more often than not - created, serve as the cornerstones of most contemporary American music.  From the boundless, wide fields of the deep south where the burgeoning cotton industry rewarded cruel masters who pushed their slave-labor force to inhuman maximums, came the field holler and field moan.  These forms that found roots in West and Central African musical traditions, expressed the sad reality of a job never done, of loved ones gone forever.  These expressions over the next century transformed into the blues...

Moving northward from the deep south, through the mid-south and former border states, the landscape wrinkles, and the forests deepen.  For slaves there, the experience could often, but not always, be less severe.  Though uncommon, slaves here sometimes bought their own freedom.  Others considered escape.  Souls on the Eastern Shores of Maryland listened for the secret code songs of Harriet Tubman.  Imbedded in the lyrics of her songs were clues indicating her arrival and route.  Elsewhere songs like "Foller de Drinkin' Goud," with origins that remain mysterious, drew secret maps to freedom.

Near my home in Cincinnati, sits the small river town of Ripley.  Today it's a collection of brick buildings and restored homes sitting quietly along a subtle bend in the Ohio river.  150 years ago the town was a key port, the second largest between the river's headwaters in Pittsburgh and terminus at Cairo, Illinois.

The stairs from downtown Ripley to the Rankin Home.

During the 1800s Ripley was the home of John Parker, a slave who'd bought his freedom.  Parker, who owned his own small iron foundry in the town, helped slaves cross the river in his row boat. Once in Ohio, he helped them evade pursuing slave hunters. It was also the home of Reverend John Rankin.  Together with his family, Rankin would shelter escaping slaves in his barn and secret chambers beneath his porch.  The Rankin home sat a top a hill that overlooked the town and the bowing river.  At night the family left a candle in the front window to guide escaping slaves making the climb.



Perhaps the most famous escapee to come through Ripley was a woman her toddler son.  In his autobiography, John Parker called her escape "the most important incident that ever took place at Ripley, during all the years of the activities of the abolition group."  With her son secured across her chest, the woman made her way across the Ohio by hopping across sheets of thin ice as hounds and hunters bellowed at her from the Kentucky side.  She made her way to the Ripley home where she was cared for and provisioned.  Harriet Beecher Stowe named this woman Eliza and her son, Harry in novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Having inspired a wealth of songs, especially in the northern states, the novel became pivotal in shaping attitudes about the realities of slavery.  In 1852 Miss M.E. Collier from Boston wrote "Eliza's Flight." (lyrics from http://utc.viriginia.edu/songs/elizasfltf.html)

The ice floating down the stream,
The wintry day is wild,
Hope lights with her underlying gleam,
The Wand'er and her child.

She clasps him closely to her heart,
Her only one-her joy,
For nought but death the two shall part,
The mother and her boy.

She sees the cold and rushing tide,
Her feet bleeding bare,
She lingers not, nor turns aside,
Yet breathes one heartful prayer.

Yet breathes one heartful prayer.

She presses on - she presses on,
Nor heeds the icy flood,
Thus only may her rest be won,
So help her mighty God!

The mother gains the further shore,
Her babe is on her breast,
The race is past, the peril o'er,
One moment is she blessed.

Ripley, Ohio, summer 2013, my daughters along for the ride.
Visible in the very center of the photo is the Rankin House
atop Liberty Hill.  Dozens of slaves on their journey to
freedom passed through the streets of Ripley and up the hill
to the Rankin House where they'd be kept safe and provisioned
for the journey north to Canada.