Singing
Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2007. Pp. xi, 312. $45.00.
Mark M. Smith
University of South Carolina
In this book, Scott Gac offers a fresh, insightful, and persuasive account of a surprisingly overlooked component of the antebellum reform movement: the Hutchinson Family Singers, arguably the most popular musical troupe of its day. Gac’s book is a powerful study of antebellum “music, careerism, reform,” the history of religion, communication networks, nineteenth-century consumerism, “and the transformation of American culture” (p. 18).
The Hutchinson Family Singers distinguished themselves in several ways. In their songs, they preached morality at a time when musical entertainment was often considered a dubious medium for communicating moral judgments; they anchored their musical style firmly in an American idiom when home-grown talent was considered inferior to that of European performers; and they managed to blend church hymns and blackface minstrelsy, adding their own lyrics, altering tempos, and harmonizing chorus refrains in ways that were genuinely new and innovative. By the 1840s, the Hutchinson Family Singers were, by any standards, famous, and they were to become even more so as they transformed themselves from largely backwoods and church-trained singers into powerful voices, literally and figuratively, for antebellum reform.
More broadly, the Hutchinson Family Singers intervened in critical political issues, especially regarding slavery and, early in their career, temperance. Yes, says Gac, the family made money from their endeavors, but, he argues, they frequently reallocated a good deal of what they made directly into progressive causes, notably the antislavery movement. The Hutchinsons were, in Gac’s view, thoroughly authentic in their commitment to the elimination of racial prejudice, and their performances did much to maintain the profile of the antislavery cause. The Singers also drew on revivalism for their inspiration, were instrumental in selling sacred music, and elaborated not only the meaning of revivalism but also disseminated it to a growing body of antebellum consumers (a point that scholars of American popular music have oddly overlooked). Although the Singers were not without their detractors-anti-abolition mobs disrupted their performances-their music traveled well and found considerable support in Britain especially.
Gac does a wonderful job of proving all of these points in appealing prose and with compelling evidence. His history of the Hutchinson Family Singers also suggests that we should pause before accepting too readily some cherished historiographical “truths.” For example, Gac shows that history of the Singers exposes the “frailty” of constructions touting the “linear narrative of white musicians’ theft of ‘everything but the burden’ from black artists” during the antebellum period (p. 7). While Gac is fully aware that southern (and some northern) criticism of the Singers exposes “the limits of reform in song” (p. 194), he shows, successfully, that songs and music shaped politics in profoundly important ways, not simply in the context of elections but in the larger sense of helping generate cultural sympathy for the most pressing political causes-antislavery and abolitionism-of the day.
Although Gac helpfully engages a good deal of American historiography, he is less successful in entering into meaningful dialogue with a slew of work, written mainly by non-Americanists, concerning the nature and meaning of aurality and the social and cultural function not just of music but of acoustemology generally. Jacques Attali’s work on the political economy of music and its production and its reception, for example, begs for comparison. After all, as Gac shows, a good deal of the appeal of the family’s music was its emotional power, its ability to inspire listeners, both of which translated often into resolutely political behavior, exactly the sort of indexing Attali attempted to establish in his work.
More than that, Gac neglects to articulate his study with the few works on the history of sound written by scholars of the American experience. Richard Rath, Peter Hoffer, Shane White, and Graham White have all written helpfully about the role of sounds generally-musical and otherwise-in shaping the experience of a variety of Americans and some engagement with this work would have been welcome. In short, Gac’s focus on music as the sine qua non of “sound” occludes the plurality of sounds available to listeners and producers in the context of antebellum reform. Not all sound was musical or vocal, and Gac could have offered us a richer aural tapestry by placing the sounds generated by the Singers-and consumed by their audiences-into a larger context of antebellum soundscapes.
Yet, on its own terms, this is a beautifully contextualized study, one that not only helps us make sense of the Hutchison Family Singers themselves but, more importantly, broadens our understanding of reform in antebellum America generally. Gac’s intervention in such an important field of scholarly inquiry demands as much scholarly applause as contemporaries frequently offered the Hutchinson Family Singers.
The American Historical Review, 113:833–834, June 2008
© 2008 American Historical Association. All rights reserved.