Conference Agenda

In 1948, Yale University Glee Club director Marshall Bartholomew wrote to William L. Dawson about his choral setting of a spiritual entitled “Hail, Mary,” which the group was rehearsing at the time: “I think you have managed to combine with rare skill the primitive nature of the spiritual with the almost liturgical chorale-like ‘Hail Mary’ which comes in the middle…This choral section doesn’t sound at all like a spiritual. Do you know its history? Was it borrowed, or picked up by accident from Catholic sources?” Dawson replied that he had composed this melody himself, taking special care to make it fit within the existing spiritual. Bartholomew’s framing of the spiritual as “primitive” and his failure to consider the prospect of Dawson’s own compositional labor reflect the racialized assumptions Dawson often endured as a Black composer of concert spirituals. Similar stories abound throughout Dawson’s career, and the reception of his work reveals white audience expectations that Black composers reflect a racialized folk authenticity in their work. This perceived authenticity rendered such works legible for white audiences as a canvas for depoliticized emotional investment in the historical plight of enslaved Black Americans that obscured and ignored contemporary racism.

Drawing on archival materials housed at Emory University, including Dawson’s correspondence, press commentary, and musical scores, I argue that his concert spirituals were better-known and more frequently performed during his lifetime than large instrumental works like his Negro Folk Symphony precisely because they better aligned with mid-century audiences’ expectations related to authenticity. At the same time, however, such demands undermined the compositional enterprise involved in their creation. While recent scholars have moved beyond simplistic understandings of the concert spiritual as a genuine, if stylized, representation of folk material, the artistry and breadth of Dawson’s’ compositions — as he deftly navigated the conflicting challenges of the mid-century US choral landscape — have not yet been fully appreciated. This paper reveals the complex balancing act of artistic expression, folk tradition, and audience pressures that shaped Dawson’s approach to concert spirituals and sheds light on larger trends of sonic racialization in the twentieth century.

­­Ignatius Sancho, a formerly enslaved, financially independent Afro-descended individual living in eighteenth-century London, was acutely aware of his position in society: his own letters show he was conscious of his Britishness and his color, its association with enslaved bodies, and the bias against those who looked like him. Indeed, in a letter of 1772 to his peer Julius Soubise, he railed against slavery and “the contempt of those very wretches who roll in affluence from our labours.” Extant documents from Sancho’s lifetime and shortly thereafter—hundreds of letters, business calling cards, a posthumous biographical sketch, several editions of his dance music and songs, a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough—have been rigorously investigated by literary scholars, and Sancho’s music has gained interest from performers and some musicologists, especially Rebecca Cypess. This paper extends existing work by interpreting Sancho’s country dances with the specific performance practices of social dance, as music that would have been announced and then played without much rehearsal in a variety of spaces by a variety of instruments.

“Mungo’s Delight” is the very last piece of music Sancho ever published, the final dance in Twelve Country Dances for the Year 1779. It’s a trifle of a thing, not more 60 seconds long, but it is surprisingly difficult and packed with cultural significance. Its treble leaps, easy to miss at speed on several types of instruments, could easily distract a dancer of a genre that many already complained was prone to “disorder.” Such physical and musical errors would have signaled different meanings to different participants, partly because of the resonance with the Blackface stage character, Mungo. Potential participants here include London’s white aristocratic establishment and significant Black communities, and it is through their perception of mistakes that this dance music could have both critiqued white abolitionist language and communicated Sancho’s antislavery project. This paper connects the performance practices of this dance to common eighteenth-century types of mishearings, misreadings, and missteps, which, in this context, could arouse sincere empathy or satirical mockery—or both. But felt by whom and in which direction? That depends on the circumstances.

The Luca Family Singers, a troupe of African American musicians from New Haven, Connecticut, performed public concerts throughout New England and Midwestern United States in the 1840s and 1850s. They sang temperance songs, comic and sentimental parlor songs, and operatic arias; instrumentalists in the troupe gained notoriety for performance of virtuosic concert pieces. Eileen Southern, in her formative Music of Black Americans: A History, explained that in the mid-nineteenth century, Black musicians rarely gained notoriety outside of their communities, but she also noted two exceptions—Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and the Luca Singers. In the decades since Southern published her foundational narrative, scholars have learned more about Greenfield, who toured as the “Black Swan,” but the Luca Family remain relatively obscure in the histories of African American music. Even while scholars Nina Sun Eidsheim, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Daphne Brooks, Matthew D. Morrison and others acknowledge the importance of this mid-nineteenth-century period when newspaper writers underscored audible and visual distinctions between Black and white music, there is still little about the pioneering Luca musicians or their reception in published scholarship.

Using digitized newspapers and other archived ephemera, this presentation provides new knowledge about the Luca Family’s activities and interprets their cultural influence. Reconstructed concert tours will show their geographical reach was more extensive than previously realized. They also collaborated with other professional musicians, performing with the renowned Hutchinson Family Singers, for example, creating a mixed-race ensemble that has received only passing mention in scholarship. Unlike their contemporary, E. T. Greenfield, who involved herself in overt public activism only after establishing a performing career, the Lucas performance at an Anti-Slavery Society Meeting in New York was important to launching their national fame. While there are some common themes in the racialized newspaper reception of both Greenfield and the Luca Family, the Lucas’ introduced themselves to the public as Black musical activists, challenging prevailing concepts of racial difference at this poignant time in American history, with blackface minstrelsy dominating the musical entertainment offerings in most Northern urban centers, an abolition movement growing, and the Civil War looming.