Review
Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform.(Book review).Journal of the Early Republic 28.3 (Fall 2008): p488(4). (1036 words)
Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press
Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform. By Scott Gac. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 328. Cloth, $45.00.)
If Elvis Costello is right that talking about music is like dancing about architecture, Scott Gac shows that music nevertheless provides a fascinating window into American cultural history. Focused mostly on the decade of the 1840s, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform offers a detailed and admiring account of the abolitionist quartet’s rise to fame, along with broader observations on reform, religion, and popular music. Placing the group’s career in the context of the political history of the antislavery movement, Gac argues that the Hutchinson Family Singers’ tremendous mass appeal illustrates the “vibrant cultural space created by waves of reform pulsating through the United States” (4). The Hutchinsons adopted familiar melodies from church hymns and blackface minstrelsy and added their own innovative vocal harmonies and lyrics that drew their power from evangelical religion and moral reform. Gac describes how this musical amalgamation marked the emergence of a newly distinctive and commercially successful identity for American musicians, enabling them to challenge the long-standing prominence of European performers. Further, the successful commercialization of abolitionist music represented nothing less than a “technological transformation of antislavery,” generating mass appeal and energy for the formally staid movement (68).
Both an accomplished musician and academic historian, the author has a highly developed appreciation for music that shapes the study in several ways. Antebellum historians have often reduced the history of music to socioeconomic developments; for instance, linking musical literacy and parlor pianos to the social aspirations of the middle class. By contrast, the content of the Hutchinson Family Singers’ music plays a central role in Gac’s story. Fans flocked to their concerts, he writes, because the music was vibrant and uplifting. This fact is vividly illustrated in an anecdote about Henry Alexander Wise, a proslavery congressman from Virginia, who eagerly shook the hands of the Hutchinson singers after a performance, apparently unaware of the antislavery meaning of their lyrics (175). Gac’s musical training may also explain his choice to adopt a complex structure of thematic chapters, and label them according to the parts of a musical score. Preceded by a prelude, four “parts” are divided into various “expositions,” “developments,” and “themes,” interrupted by an “intermission” and followed by a “finale.” “Part First,” for instance, consists of two “scenes,” juxtaposing moments in the Hutchinsons’ career. The first scene offers an extended meditation on the significance of an 1893 reunion of antislavery activists, and the second documents the process and significance of the Hutchinsons’ choice in 1843 to sing in support of abolition.
Singing for Freedom presents an original and revealing account of the market imperatives that American musicians faced in the mid nineteenth century. Tracing the group’s rise from obscurity in rural New Hampshire to international fame, Gac portrays the Hutchinson singers as highly principled but savvy entrepreneurs. What made them “unique was their combining of social reform, music, and tremendous popularity” (14), Gac argues, beginning a tradition in American popular music that continues today. Certainly, when reading about the Hutchinson Singers’ tours, finances, and marketing strategies, it is hard not to think of the enormous popular success of protest singers during the social reform movements of the 1960s, such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Rather than selling t-shirts, the Hutchinson Singers used performances to market their sheet music and lyric books–a strategy that, Gac demonstrates, proved very lucrative. These two impulses, moral conviction and material acquisitiveness, were not contradictory. Indeed, Gac writes, “the key” to the success of the group was their “moral fortitude” (16). The tremendous wealth they garnered–occasionally earning as much as $1,000 for each performance–was a happy by-product of their remarkable ear for melody and lyric writing.
This study joins a growing body of scholarship that focuses on the increasingly diverse activities and cultural productions of abolitionists, temperance advocates and other reformers during the 1840s, including antislavery fairs, sewing circles, dances, popular literature, and theater. Abolitionist groups promoted the Hutchinson Family Singers, hired them to play at conventions, and disseminated their lyrics. Gac’s book contains many abolitionist luminaries, including especially Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, testifying to the historical importance of the singing group in spreading the word of antislavery. Gac argues that abolitionists were drawn to the Hutchinsons in part because of the growing divide and acrimony between the followers of the increasingly radical Garrison and activists who moved toward greater participation in mainstream politics through the newly formed Liberty Party. The quality of the Hutchinsons’ singing was one thing that abolitionists of all stripes could agree on, and so the group played an important role as “unifiers of abolitionist reform” (11).
Judging the significance of the Hutchinson Family Singers to the direction of antislavery politics proves to be more difficult than assessing their commercial appeal. Gac writes that the “magnitude of the Hutchinson Family Singers’ success during the 1840s” suggests that “antislavery … was … growing more popular in the North” and “that the aesthetic of their music broke through ideological and political barriers” (194). Unanswered are difficult questions about how the group’s concerts influenced membership in antislavery organizations or political participation. For the most part, Gac sees the prospects of the Hutchinson singers as being shaped by developments in antislavery politics rather than the other way around. The book’s “Finale,” attributes the demise of the group in the 1850s to growing divisions between family members and to the changing nature of antislavery politics. The Hutchinsons’ relatively liberal lyrics clashed, Gac argues, with the racist politics of the Know-Nothings and other nativist movements that were ascendant in the early 1850s. Nevertheless, future scholarship on reform in the 1840s will have to consider this study’s central finding: During a decade in which antislavery activists became increasingly fractured, with significant numbers drifting toward political opportunism and racist appeals, one of the greatest singing groups in American history emerged under the banner of abolition.
Matthew Warner Osborn is a lecturer at Occidental College. He is currently writing a social and cultural history of medical responses to alcohol abuse in the early republic.