get these nets
Veteran
July 20, 2022
Songs of Slavery and Emancipation: Album revives slave revolt songs
“Songs of Slavery and Emancipation,” the book and double-album were released on June 17 by Jalopy Records in New York and a film of the same name documents the process of discovering and recording American slave rebellion songs that had been lost and/or hidden until now. (Contributed)
July 20, 2022 at 2:00 p.m.
Mat Callahan is a musician and insurgent historian whose latest project is, “Songs of Slavery and Emancipation.” The book and double-album were released on June 17 by Jalopy Records in New York and a film of the same name documents the process of discovering and recording American slave rebellion songs that had been lost and/or hidden until now.
Callahan’s research spanned six years and was originally sparked when he discovered a 1939 pamphlet by Herbert Aptheker, “Negro Slave Revolts in the United States 1526-1860.”
Callahan has performed and recorded multiple albums including solo projects, albums with his wife Yvonne Moore and, in the 1980s and ’90s with his band The Looters. He’s author of half a dozen books including “Working Class Heroes: A History of Struggle in Song” and “The Explosion of Deferred Dreams: Musical Renaissance and Social Revolution in San Francisco, 1965-1975.” Callahan was born and raised in San Francisco and now lives in Switzerland. The Sentinel recently spoke with Callahan about “Songs of Slavery and Emancipation.”
American Negro slave revolts
Q: “Tell me about discovering the pamphlet by Herbert Aptheker that inspired you to look for more songs of American slave rebellions.”A: “Bolerium Books is an antiquarian bookshop on Mission Street in San Francisco. It’s not on street level, so you have to know about it. I’d been there before when I was doing research for a book called “The Explosion of Deferred Dreams” about the music and politics of San Francisco in the ’60s,” Callahan recalls. “There’s a section in the bookshop about the Civil War and Black history and I found a little pamphlet by Herbert Aptheker. I’d read Aptheker’s magnum opus, “A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States” years before. But I’d never seen this pamphlet, “Negro Slave Revolts in the United States 1526-1860.”
I was standing there leafing through it and the words of a song jumped off the page;
“Arise! Arise! Shake off your chains! Your cause is just, so Heaven ordains! Drive each tyrant from the land!”
“According to Aptheker, these lyrics had been composed by enslaved people during a secret meeting to plan a revolt in 1813,” Callahan continues. “I thought, ‘What? Are there more songs like this? If so, why don’t we know about them?’ I grew up in a household where we learned about Benjamin Banneker, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. When I was young, I listened to all of the classic negro spirituals like ‘Many Thousands Gone’ and ‘Steal Away’ and ‘Roll Jordan Roll.’ Many of these lamented the conditions of enslaved people and some were clearly protests like ‘Go Down Moses’ with, ‘Let my people go!” But none of them were explicit revolutionary songs calling, “Arise! Arise! Shake off your chains!’ Enslaved people had music as one of their most vital tools. Why didn’t we know about the songs they used to plan rebellions and celebrate their heroes? It was that strange paradox which got me searching for more songs.”
Slavocracy
Q: “You point out that the dates in the title of Aptheker’s pamphlet – 1526 to 1860 – represent a period that’s earlier and longer than most of us have been taught that slavery existed. According to Aptheker, slavery in North America began in 1526, and the first revolt against slavery also happened in 1526. Rebellions were not seldom, as many of were taught. Aptheker describes the period as a slavocracy and writes that one of America’s first sit-down strikes was perhaps by a slave named Tony, in Maryland in 1656. He lists the number of slave revolts by year and state and discusses over two hundred “reported” Negro revolts and emphasizes the word “reported” because there were many rebellions that were censored by newspapers and historians of the day.”A: “It struck me as odd that if there were many rebellions by enslaved people, why wasn’t that reflected in the music we knew about? Especially for people whose music was one of the only means of expression they were allowed, aside from poetry or perhaps storytelling,” Callahan told the Sentinel. “There are examples of rebel songs from all over the world. In a previous project – “Songs of Freedom: The James Connolly Songbook” – I discovered this book in the National Library of Dublin that had been published in the United States by Irish revolutionary James Connolly. I discovered hundreds of Irish rebel songs that are well known in Ireland. I could say the same thing about Mexican corridos, songs from the era of the Mexican Revolution.”
Q: “Tell me about your search for slave rebellion songs.”
A: “My goal was to accumulate enough songs to prove that this one song in Aptheker’s book was not a fluke. And that the experience of resistance to slavery in North America bore the same signs as rebellions and resistance to oppression that have occurred elsewhere historically. It was to refute this clearly erroneous notion that the slaves accepted their fate and were liberated by Abraham Lincoln or conscience-stricken whites,” says Callahan. “In my naivete, I thought I’d discover some book that was published in the 21st century that brought out all these songs. But I couldn’t find it. And that’s when my interest was really piqued. Professional folklorists and professors were telling me, “No, I’ve never heard of any songs like this.” Not only that but, “Why would you ask that question? Everybody knows the slaves didn’t rebel.”
Q: “You emphasize that slave revolts and the abolition movement served each other.”
A: “The abolitionist movement was powerful. It actually did drive politics in the United States, up to the point of civil war. Often the abolitionist movement has been reduced to John Brown; one individual and one episode. As opposed to a movement over several different waves going back to the Revolutionary period, dying out in the early 19th century, then re-surging again between 1830 and the Civil War. People forget that the Civil War was the response of the slavocracy, the plantation owners, the people who were profiting from slavery. They launched an insurrection, a civil war, to literally separate the country. They were being threatened from within, meaning by both slave revolts and the Underground Railroad. At least 100,000 fled slavery between 1830 and the Civil War, which doesn’t include all the other fugitives earlier. The reality is that this constant rebellion was also reflected in music. The evidence comes out of the songs themselves. They are expressions of a movement and the lyrics bare the stamp of this movement.”
Q: “It’s amazing we don’t know about the continual revolts by enslaved people in America and that they were inspired by successful slave revolts in places like Haiti in 1804.”
A: “The system of slavocracy in the U.S. has been grossly oversimplified,” Callahan summarizes. “By the time the civil war broke out, slavery was a highly complex system that had lasted for several hundred years that had been built up through various legal mechanisms. It’s not just a question of some sort of abstract racism. It was a question of law that says slaves were not humans, legally and socially, “These people are not people. They are the same as a mule.” They are literally the private property of their owners and the rules of private property superseded all others. This tells you two things; What actually mattered in the foundation of the United States was private property. And secondly, the slave ids a piece of chattel property, they’re not just oppressed or segregated. As Chief Justice Taney said in 1857, “They have no rights that a white man needs to respect.” This is fundamentally constituted of the United States.”