This paper examines a strand of Black music history in southern Iran from the late Qajar to early Pahlavi era, focusing on the entanglement of slav ery, abolition, and the agency of Black musicians in shaping religious and non-religious music across public and semi-public spaces. Framed by the contemporary resonance of loud, collective, male-only dammām drum ming during Muharram and Safar in Bushehr, it considers how this his tory is narrated today by local performers and scholars, and how these narratives intersect with, or diverge from, historical accounts. I draw on historical accounts in which the presence of Black people is most often de scribed through musical moments. These sources reveal how music linked to marginalized communities circulated between religious and non-reli gious settings, often inhabiting liminal positions—between sound and si lence, freedom and unfreedom, visibility and invisibility—especially in the years immediately after abolition, when former slaves navigated new so cial and economic roles. By rereading these fragmentary sources alongside contemporary oral histories, I discuss an alternative way of thinking about the past of this collective music, one that bears the history of life in a port city shaped by the Indian Ocean slave trade and layered with geopolitical upheavals. The paper concludes by returning to the present-day dammām drumming of Bushehr, which endures not only as an audible trace of the past but also as a vessel for its silences, erasures, and the shifting bound aries between what is remembered and what is forgotten.