During the American Revolution, abolitionism became a social movement for the first time. Amid their appeals for liberty and equality, Americans increasingly realized the contradictions of owning slaves, and even prominent Founding Father slaveholders spoke of the need to find ways to reform or phase out the institution. The first explicit abolitions in the world occurred amid the War of Independence. By the early republic, antislavery societies became numerous – though the cause’s momentum was thwarted in the closed-door Constitutional Convention and the rise of cotton in the American South in the 1790s motivated a new spread of slavery.

This chapter turns to the sorrow songs, beginning with the famous passage from Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies. It focuses on the ethnography of African American song traditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of professionalisation of folklore studies in the American academy. White folklorists claimed the songs were irrational, primitive, childlike, unmediated expressions of feeling; other qualities were discovered by African American ethnographers, including Zora Neale Hurston. The songs were also forms of exploitative labour. The chapter includes a reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem ‘A Corn Song’. Dunbar’s shifts between African American vernacular and ‘standard’ English illuminate the tendency of white folklorists to call attention to the failure of the printed and disembodied textual transcription to transmit the real power of the performed lyric. The chapter considers the attempt to secure an ‘authentic’ Black sound through recordings in prisons and labour camps. It also challenges the notion of authenticity through a reading of Olio by Tyehimba Jess, a work that seeks to recover – through a form of poetic ventriloquy – the thoughts and feelings of the artists whose work was appropriated by white critics, scholars and producers in this period.