A Revolution of Music

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             Firstly, African Americans have used music as a marker of identifying their blackness and discourse from their homeland of Africa. Moreover, beginning in the seventeenth century, a burgeoning slave trade saw Africans captured and brought to America in bondage, separated from their relations and sold, leaving individuals with no point of familiarity: forced into slavery, on a new continent, without kin or social contacts (Sullivan 21). Therefore, identifying black identity and blackness came fought through the method of music. Music became a way that blacks reconnected themselves to their homeland. They created a familiarity of home through music. A great sense of hope for blacks came from their singing which was spread to other slaves to send a message that would either help with escaping or expressing their feelings. Slaves were not allowed to learn how to read or write so their music was their key instrument for communicating secretly with their fellow slaves. Most songs gave slaves direction to the land of freedom (Canada), helped to guide them through the routes that were safe and warn them of any impending dangers. Harriet Tubman, in her song Wade in the Water, used this as a secret message to warn slaves to escape in the water and get off the trails so that the dogs slave catchers used could not find them. In Frederick Douglas book, My Bondage and My Freedom tells of spirituals, like Tubmans that implied coded messages to help the slaves escape. Douglas, in his book states that Negro spirituals was a favorite air, and had a double meaning. In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but, in the lips of our company, it simply meant, a speedy pilgrimage toward a Free State, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery (Douglas 184). So, music was not only a marker of identity and blackness but it was also a way for deliverance from the harsh treatments of slavery.