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Book Review
| Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, Beacon Press, Boston, 2005. pp. xxii + 241 + 18 track CD. $55.95 cloth.
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| The historiography devoted to African American slavery is vast and contentious. During recent decades, historians have cast new light on many aspects of slavery, providing us with fresh insights into the slaves' lives. Some of this historiographical re-rendering has rested on a reinterpretation of 'old', predominantly 'white' sources, such as plantation records, and the diaries and letters of slaveholders. But in producing more nuanced views of American slavery, and the African American culture that emerged from the horrors of the 'peculiar institution', historians have also exploited 'black' sources, beyond the slave narratives which have always provided evocative insights into the slaves' lives. In The Sounds of Slavery, Australian scholars Shane White and Graham White take a significant step in a different, long-neglected direction, by focusing on the aural aspects of slave society. In so doing, they utilise white and black sources to illuminate the worlds of work and play, both secular and spiritual, of the black underclass, upon whose toil much of America's economy has always rested. |
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Often derided by whites, African Americans' music and songs — along with their 'calls', and other forms of aural expression — were suffused with political meaning. Of course, we are all familiar with the African American origins of the blues, and jazz. But White and White, ever-attentive to the political implications of the sounds of slavery, delve much more deeply into the slaves' aural world. While whites were frequently contemptuous of the slaves' songs and music, and sought to reassure themselves that the slaves' singing was evidence they were happy with their lot, there were also occasions when whites expressed apprehension about the sounds of slavery. Not only did they sometimes seek to ban slaves' drumming, which conjured up images of mass rebellion by mobs of aggrieved Africans, but some also sought to prevent their slaves from gathering together to sing. |
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As important as African American songs and music are, White and White do much more than provide us with a reading of those aspects of black culture. Their comprehensive 'soundscape' of black life includes analysis of story-telling, field hollers, and sermons. Inevitably, African American churches — and religious styles — figure prominently in The Sounds of Slavery. Where other scholars have described the cultural tensions between African American religious practices, White and White provide us with a clearer, more evocative sense of the 'battle over religious sound' (p. 108). The soundscape of slavery, of course, was not confined to the plantations. White and White explore in rich detail the sounds of slavery in urban areas, where masters' control was always more tenuous, and where a distinctive urban black culture developed, that both reflected, and differed from, that which emerged outside America's cities. |
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One of the real highlights of this study is the manner in which the authors allow their subjects to speak (and sing, shout, and call) for themselves. Throughout the book we are treated to an array of vignettes, which foreground the sounds of slavery, and ensure that readers are never allowed to forget the essential humanity of African American culture. The system, no doubt, was de-personalising and brutal, but for black Americans sounds were an expression of their collective resistance to the excesses of slavery. The description, for example, of the execution of 'Jenny', a 70-year-old African American woman, conveys a great deal about the collective anguish expressed by the assembled crowd of 1,500 African Americans. Just 'moments before Jenny' was hanged, several hundred blacks 'turned their backs to the gallows, squatted on the ground, "covered their faces with their hands, and uttered a simultaneous groan"', which expressed their feelings about the execution, and added to the 'horror of the scene' (p. xvii). Valuable, too, is the 18-track CD which accompanies The Sounds of Slavery. Taken primarily from recordings compiled by Alan Lomax during the 1930s, the CD helps bring to life the soundscape White and White have so carefully traced. |
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Where many students of black history comfort themselves by speaking of the ways in which white Americans have 'appropriated' aspects of black culture — particularly, but not exclusively, its music — White and White are more forthright: at the same time as they demonstrate that the 'cultures of master and slave were entwined', they also insist that a 'long line of white entertainers' has 'stolen the sounds of black culture' (p. 186). Based on deep research, and always with a sympathetic ear for the sources, The Sounds of Slavery represents an important contribution to African American history, which will further enhance the authors' already formidable reputations. |
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| University of Newcastle |
CHRIS DIXON | |
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