Sources for “The Sorrow Songs”
This essay, which grew out of an excerpt from my book Making Sense of Slavery, covers the history of the study of slave songs, starting with the experiences of Lucy McKim, William Francis Allen, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War and continuing through the works of various sociologists, anthropologists, and historians over the next century.
For the early study of slave songs and the making of the book Slave Songs of the United States, the essential book is Dena Epstein’s Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (1977). I supplemented Epstein’s account with more recent works on some of the main figures involved: on Lucy McKim Garrison, Samuel Charters’s Songs of Sorrow: Lucy McKim Garrison and Slave Songs of the United States (2015); on William Francis Allen, James Robert Hester’s A Yankee Scholar in Coastal South Carolina: William Francis Allen’s Civil War Journals (2015); and on Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Howard Meyer’s The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2000) and Christopher Looby’s The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2000). For broader background on the Port Royal Experiment, see Willie Lee Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964).
For the postwar fate of the songs, Andrew Ward’s Dark Midnight When I Rise (2000) covers the Fisk Jubilee Singers.
For Du Bois, in addition to his own writings, I relied most heavily on David Levering Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015). My ideas about Du Bois have also been influenced by Francille Rusan Wilson’s The Segregated Scholars: Black Social Scientists and the Creation of Black Labor Studies, 1890–1950 (2006), though it was less directly applicable to this essay.
After Du Bois, I cover the different ways that the young academic disciplines of anthropology and sociology approached the problem of slave culture. The best overview of this material is Lee Baker’s From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (1998). For Franz Boas, I relied most heavily on William Willis Jr.’s essay “Franz Boas and the Study of Black Folklore,” in the collection The New Ethnicity: Perspectives from Ethnology, edited by John Bennett (1975). For Robert Park, I turned to Fred Matthews’s Quest for an American Sociology: Robert E. Park and the Chicago School (1977). Winifred Raushenbush’s biography of Park (1979) also includes good details.
For the historians writing about slavery after World War II (Kenneth Stampp, Stanley Elkins, and so on), I relied largely on the books themselves but also benefited a great deal from the treatments in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (1998) and especially August Meier and Elliott Rudwick’s Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915–1980 (1986). In addition, there is a gold mine of detail about Lawrence Levine’s life and thought in the the oral history that Ann Lage of the Bancroft Library conducted with him shortly before his death.