Singing
The Sound of Antebellum Reform
Karl Hagstrom Miller
Scott Gac. Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth- Century Culture of Antebellum Reform. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 328 pp. Appendix, notes, and index.
When is an abolition song not an abolition song? When it is heard as an ode to familial love or a declaration of American distinctiveness, a crass commercial ploy or an evocation of the Swiss Alps. Scott Gac’s elegant and provocative portrait of the famous antislavery musicians, the Hutchinson Family Singers, reveals both the power and the limitations of music as a political tool within the reform movements of the 1840s. Many listeners embraced—or rejected—the explicit calls for abolition in the family’s words, identifying the group’s music, for better or worse, as a novel form of political polemic. Others paid little heed to such lyrics, connecting instead with the variety of other messages or associations they heard in the groups’ performances. The Hutchinsons worked to develop a unified cadre of activists through song. To their possible consternation, they often forged a mere audience, a heterogeneous crowd brought together more by a shared appreciation for the family’s music than by a common interpretation of it.
Popular music scholars have been grappling with the matter of musical meaning for quite some time. In his now seminal 1981 study, Simon Frith evoked a growing consensus when he argued that “ideological meaning was decided in the process of consumption” rather than the production of music.1 The floodgates have since opened wide, and few scholars are willing to limit their interpretation of popular songs to the willful intent of authors or performers. Consumers, or listeners, forge their own interpretations of what they hear. Identifying a particular meaning for a piece of music—long acknowledged as the most abstract of the arts—is slippery business. Authorial intent provides a starting place, but such interpretive fetters must be loosed once the sounds are let out into the air. This may be true particularly when attempting to discern the historical relationship between music and politics. Indeed, Frith and others pushed to open up the interpretive possibilities of popular music in order to identify culture as a primary site of political struggle. Pop tunes might do important work forging collective identities, tapping collective memories, voicing dissent or imagining utopias even as they remain explicit odes to puppy love or dancing in the street. The most literal interpretation, Frith suggested, may not be the most historically significant.
Gac is well aware of these concerns. His narrative charts myriad overlapping contexts and connotations of the family’s music. “The rise of the Hutchinson Family Singers in the 1840s reveals a complex interaction of personal ambition, religion, reform, and consumerism alongside an antislavery network buttressed by influential leaders, a vast media, and a growing following,” he writes (p. 24). Yet Gac’s project is quite different from that of most popular music scholars. Rather than divining the political meanings of ostensibly apolitical pop, he attempts to identify the constellation of interpretations surrounding explicitly political songs. He largely succeeds.
The Hutchinson brothers started out to be singers rather than activists. John, Asa, and Josiah Hutchinson began the 1840s in dire straits. The progeny of a struggling farm family unable to bequeath land to fourteen siblings, they imagined a singing group could provide alternative employment. In 1841, they left their parents’ farm in Milford, New Hampshire, a site of growing abolitionist activities, and moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. There they attempted to launch singing careers while working at their older brother’s grocery store. They found little initial success, hampered by both their tentative performances and, Gac explains, by a common American preference for European over homegrown musicians. They pleaded on an early handbill, “When foreigners approach your shores, You welcome them with open doors, Now we have come to seek our lot, Shall native talent be forgot” (p. 130)? They eventually overcame such prejudice by shaping themselves after the Rainer Family, one of the most popular European acts to tour the States.
By the time the Rainer Family from the Tyrol landed in the United States in 1839, they had already sparked a musical movement in Europe. The three sons and one daughter of a cattle dealer began performing in 1824. Dressed in traditional costumes, they offered Tyrolean folk songs sung in close harmony and peppered with virtuosic yodeling. Their casual stage presence—standing still with one hand latched to their belts—bespoke an authenticity that stood in stark contrast to the comparative histrionics of the opera, while their commitment to native folk songs about the Alps fed a growing appetite for nationalistic music throughout Western Europe. By the early 1830s, imitators from England to Germany and Italy donned traditional outfits and sang folk songs with their siblings. The fad spread to the United States during the mid-1830s, as American singing teachers adopted some of the group’s music. When the Rainers toured the United States between 1839 and 1843, family singing groups emerged in their wake, most adopting the Rainers’ singing style and projecting a similar affection for outdoor living and the mountains—the Alps in particular.2 At least some of the Hutchinsons saw the Rainers perform in 1841. The New Hampshire clan quickly adopted the groups’ signature “Tyrolean style of singing” while the eleven-year-old newcomer Abby donned a “Swiss bodice” onstage (p. 137). The Hutchinsons began garnering the praise and attention that had previously eluded them. They soon became the most successful of the crop of family singers modeled on the Rainers.
Within a few short years the Rainer style had lost many of its European associations for United States audiences and came to be heard as uniquely American. Walt Whitman, for example, celebrated an 1845 performance by the popular Cheney Family specifically for its lack of foreign influence. “Never having been present at any of the Hutchinson’s Concerts (the Cheneys, we are told, are after the same token,) the elegant simplicity of this style took us completely by surprise, and our gratification was inexpressible,” he wrote. “This, said we in our heart, is the true method which must become popular in the United States—which must supplant the stale, second-hand, foreign method, with its flourishes, its ridiculous sentimentality, its anti-republican spirit, and its sycophantic influence, tainting the young taste of the republic.”3 This remarkable transformation stands as testament to the flexibility of the emerging standards of folkloric performance. Casual posture, plain singing, and a love of nature could evoke the Yankee farmer or Emerson’s common man as easily as it could the Alpine herder.
Gac largely explains the Americanization of Tyrolean singing through the Hutchinsons’ lyrical adoption of local subject matter. The family’s early signature song, written in 1843, maintained the Rainer formula while trading the Alps for the hills of their native New Hampshire, already a thriving tourist destination:
We have come from the mountains,
We have come from the mountains,
We have come from the mountains of the Old Granite State.
The song also professed the singers’ love of family, religion, temperance and abolition. The Hutchinsons had become teetotalers in the late 1830s, spurred by the teachings of their Baptist church back in Milford. In 1842 they began featuring temperance songs such as “King Alcohol” in their concerts, weaving the unique language of United States Christian reform into the burgeoning commercial music scene. Gac wonderfully exploits the delicious complexity of their act. “The Hutchinsons lived between two worlds, exposing both the international and domestic settings of antebellum romanticism,” he writes. “The group’s earliest advertisement revealed a desire to be recognized as ‘American’ performers—and their singing of temperance spoke directly to a national concern—yet the Hutchinsons walked on stage in Swiss alpine gear” (p. 142). If temperance provided the family’s introduction to musical reform, abolitionism would stand as its most potent manifestation. The abolitionist newspaper editor Nathaniel P. Rogers, knowing the Hutchinson family’s private convictions, egged the group to add antislavery songs to its repertoire in 1843. The siblings complied and soon became a sensation within the movement. Heralded in the abolitionist press, the Hutchinsons sang for practically every antislavery organization in New England. They would regularly launch and conclude meetings with hearty renditions of their antislavery songs, providing musical bookends for the speechifying in between. When debate got particularly heated—or when hecklers attempted to disrupt the affair—the Hutchinsons often rose from the gallery and burst into spontaneous song to restore order.
Gac carefully parses the implications of combining music and abolitionism. On the one hand, he explains, singing ran the risk of alienating movement stalwarts, some of whom opposed the inclusion of music on religious grounds. “We are sorry to hear that the Hutchinson family of singers is expected to be there,” wrote Quaker Lucretia Mott in anticipation of an 1843 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. She preferred the organization not resort to “mere excitement to carry on the work.” Others associated some of the Hutchinsons’ hymn-derived songs with an organized Christianity they believed far too complicit with slavery (pp. 56–7). On the other hand, music held the potential of attracting and energizing new recruits. The family’s four-part harmony and down-home demeanor breathed life into meetings previously characterized by an endless procession of orators and inspired those left cold by too much talk. The family singers’ thus help illuminate some of the tensions involved in the expansion of northern abolitionism from a small, dedicated movement into a larger, more heterogeneous one.
Their music potentially provided a unifying identity and culture for the antislavery movement as it grew, yet determining its effectiveness provides something of a quandary for historians of the movement. The problem hinges on a basic question of what work music accomplishes. Gac suggests that for a time between 1843 and 1845 the Hutchinson Family Singers were able to unify the faction within the antislavery movement dedicated to Garrisonian moral suasion and advocates of hard electoral politics. Yet he also carefully examines memoirs from Hutchinson Family fans, whose political proclivities ranged from demands for full abolition to the support of colonization, fear of miscegenation to exasperation with the hubbub about slavery. In light of such diversity of opinion, it is tempting to say that the Hutchinsons did not bridge ideological divides within the antislavery movement as much as they accommodated them. Gac tends to want more, insisting that they accomplished with song a political unity that eluded mere orators. Yet by his estimation only 14 percent of the family’s performances were for reform functions. He argues that this was enough to display “the extent to which social reform suffused their career” (p. 187). The remaining 86 percent were concerts for general paying audiences, who shared no particular relationship to temperance, abolition, or even Swiss bodices. These concerts made the family rich. They were able to contribute to reform causes and live comfortably, while their father was able to realize his dream of quitting the farm and becoming an itinerant preacher. Many observers at the time identified the family’s commercial success as evidence of their lack of commitment to radical reform. Gac wonderfully contextualizes such critiques, demonstrating the tensions and possibilities involved in the growing interpenetration of reform culture and commercial entertainment (pp. 183–7). One wishes he would have gone farther, however, in acknowledging the profound pull commercial success may have had on the landless siblings. Instead, his is a story of supremely dedicated reformers ever committed to their goal of ending slavery.
A turning point in Gac’s narrative comes when the Hutchinsons gave a brief concert for President John Tyler and gathered guests in Washington, DC, on January 31, 1844. It was the farthest south the New Hampshire natives ever performed, though their lush renditions of temperance and antislavery songs had already caught the ears of many reform-minded northerners. Liquor flowed in the room of proslavery politicians as the family ran through their set. They sang patriotic songs and a sentimental ode to the family bible before ending with their signature piece, “The Old Granite State,” a stanch declaration of their opposition to the drink and chattel slavery their audience held dear. The singers were surprised to by the crowd’s enthusiastic response. Henry Alexander Wise, the vehemently proslavery congressman from Virginia, glad handed the singers after the concert, thanking them for a job well done (pp. 174–5). It was hard to pick a fight in four-part harmony. If antislavery audiences, including colonizationists and anti-amalgamationists, had pushed at the limit of the Hutchinsons’ unifying message, Wise’s handshake broke it. The interpretive possibilities of the group’s music were too broad for their liking.
In response, Jesse Hutchinson penned “Get Off the Track,” which Gac describes as “a work nearly impossible to interpret as anything other than an antislavery diatribe” (p. 177).
Ho! The Car Emancipation
Rides majestic thro’ our nation
Bearing on its train the story,
LIBERTY! A Nation’s Glory.
Roll it along, Roll it along,
Roll it along, Thro’ the Nation
Freedom’s Car Emancipation.
Gac carefully dissects the song, tagging its multiple political goals of healing wounds within abolitionism while demanding those outside the movement take a stand. It warned professional classes (“merchants, editors, physicians/ Lawyers, priests and politicians”) to jump aboard or get run over. “Get Off the Track” then attempted to portray Garrisonians and political party activists as part of the same unstoppable movement. It celebrated both Garrison’s Liberator and the Liberty Party as essential to the movement to end slavery, even as it leaned toward acknowledging party politics as the movement’s ultimate destination. It also took direct aim at compromiser Henry Clay, whose collusions with slavery, it argued, would no longer abide: “Railroads to Emancipation/Cannot rest on a Clay foundation.” Several northern newspapers chided the family for the song, especially its attack on the Whig presidential candidate. For many listeners, the attack on Clay provided the most obvious and immediate context for the song. “Get off the Track,” in fact, was a re-interpretation of Clay’s well-known 1844 campaign song, “Get out of the Way,” complete with a common melody and imagery. Few listeners familiar with the Clay vehicle could have missed its blatant appropriation by the Hutchinsons. The song became a breakaway hit in antislavery circles. Audience cheers proved the commercial potential of reform-minded music (pp. 180–1).
Gac holds his subject matter pretty close to the vest, keeping his attention focused on the narrative of the Huchinson family. We follow them, for example, as they retreated from the scene around 1846, when intra-family disagreements and a changing rhetoric of abolitionism made them less effective activists. Yet along the way Gac contextualizes their story in a number of ways. He provides useful summaries of the literature on northern rural households, Christian reform movements in the wake of the Second Great Awakening, ongoing tensions in the abolition movement, and the growing commercialization of leisure. I am particularly thankful for his detailed accounts of the economics of musical tours in the antebellum era, a rather shadowy subject upon which he sheds some much needed light.
I am less enamored with his handling of blackface minstrelsy, the potent genre whose popularity in the United States far surpassed Tyrolean singing during the 1840s. Gac confesses that he gives minstrelsy short attention, insisting that the genre has come to dominate the literature on antebellum popular music to the exclusion of other styles. I do not disagree, but I remain unconvinced by his portrayal of the Hutchinsons’ relationship to blackface. Gac develops two basic arguments. First, he maintains that the family sang what he calls “antiminstrelsy.” A number of the Hutchinsons’ songs were based on the melodies of well-known minstrel tunes, a common tactic for reform composers interested in tapping into listeners’ previous musical experiences. Gac dubs these compositions “antiminstrelsy” because they directly replaced bigoted lyrics with calls for reform (p. 5). This not only dispensed with black stereotypes but also “enhanced the melody’s marketability by making it palatable to those suspicious of immoral entertainment” such as early blackface (p. 179). Those who loved popular minstrel melodies but remained uncomfortable with the compromises of commercial culture could now sing them with a clear conscience. Second, Gac argues that the Hutchinsons and other family groups “pushed” minstrel companies to soften their depictions of black characters by demonstrating the market power of sentimentality and nostalgia. From the mid-1840s through the 1850s, blackface minstrels moved from exaggerated, supposedly humorous, depictions of black difference to sentimentalized images of slaves longing for home, hearth, and the old plantation. Gac insists that minstrel companies were following the Hutchinsons’ model, making music that could find a place within the pious home at the parlor piano (pp. 200–2).
Gac implies that minstrelsy lost some of its racist bite as it moved toward emancipation or domestication. Given what he teaches us about the variety of overlapping interpretive possibilities of music in other parts of his book, such simple transformations appear unlikely. Musical connotations linger. While Simon Frith insists that musical meaning emerges at the point of consumption, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld reveals that audiences are able to maintain numerous—often contradictory—interpretations almost simultaneously. In an influential essay titled “Communication, Music, and Speech about Music,” Feld suggests that listeners derive pleasure not by comprehending any fundamental or essential meaning in a piece of music, but through experiencing a flood of possible interpretations over the course of a performance. Music’s affective power lies in its multiplicity rather than its singularity of meaning.4 Feld’s work suggests that musical meaning is additive, that when nineteenth-century Americans heard “Get Off the Track,” they did not jettison older interpretations but contemplated the Hutchinsons’ emancipation rhetoric alongside Henry Clay’s bid for office, and the messages of black inferiority in the minstrel tune “Old Dan Tucker” upon which both songs were based. Likewise, when blackface composers such as Stephen Foster made minstrelsy safe for the respectable white home, they did not simply overturn the heinous stereotypes of earlier blackface ditties. They made black inferiority an acceptable subject for white parlor sing-a-longs, possibly enabling some white northerners to embrace both the Hutchinsons’ calls for emancipation and minstrels’ ubiquitous depictions of runaway slaves pinning for the land of cotton. The first identified slavery as a moral blight on the nation. The second often acknowledged slave humanity more than older blackface songs but suggested that slaves were not fit for full citizenship. The two may have worked in tandem to enable northern white listeners to embrace antislavery without rejecting white supremacy.
Gac does not explore such interpretive ambiguities. He repeatedly states that the Hutchinson family detested minstrelsy but gives little direct proof for his claim. The evidence he does provide implies a more complicated tale. A telling passage finds Asa Hutchinson suggesting that the family attend a minstrel show. Brother John rejected the appeal and “reportedly persuaded everyone to stay at home and hold a ‘family meeting,’ at which they sang the church tune ‘The Old Hundred’ and ‘talked about heaven.’” Gac uses the story to show that “the Hutchinson Family Singers were never fond of minstrelsy” (p. 202). He does not probe the ways in which Asa—and many white northerners—may have celebrated abolitionism while yearning to partake in a little black fun. Scott Gac has penned a wonderful, nuanced examination of the relationship between political activism and popular culture in the 1840s. He draws reform, consumerism, religion, nationalism and song into an intricate web that teaches us a great deal about the complexities of the campaign to end slavery, and American culture more broadly, during the period. Readers would have benefited had he brought his demonstrated interpretive skills to the subject of blackface and how, when it came to minstrelsy and its messages of black inferiority, even the most celebrated family of white musical reformers remained a house divided.
Karl Hagstrom Miller Karl Hagstrom Miller, Department of History and the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (forthcoming from Duke University Press).
Footnotes
1. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (1981), 57.
2. Hans Nathan, “The Tyrolese Family Rainer, and the Vogue of Singing Mountain-Troupes in Europe and America,” Musical Quarterly 32:1 (1946): 63–79.
3. Walt Whitman, “Art-Singing and Heart-Singing,” Broadway Journal (November 29, 1945) as reprinted in Whitman, The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, Volume I, ed. Emory Holloway (1921), 104–5.
4. Steven Feld, “Communication, Music, and Speech about Music,” in Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (1994), 77–95.