The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #128220 Message #3231424
Posted By: Gibb Sahib
29-Sep-11 - 10:02 PM
Thread Name: The Advent and Development of Chanties
Subject: RE: The Advent and Development of Chanties
1853 Bright, Henry Arthur. Free Blacks and Slaves. Would Immediate Abolition Be a Blessing? London: Arthur Hall Virtue & Co.
Just something as a point of reference to the speculative idea that has popped up here and there that, if African-Americans were at the forefront of introducing the concept and/or the repertoire for the "modern" chanties, a subsequent shift in that development may have been due to the disappearance of Black labor in certain trades. Or, the development and spread of chanties may have been affected by the movement of non-Blacks replacing them, taking over the reins and perhaps acquiring the chanties.
A letter from an anti-abolitionist.
Quotes from a letter to the Maryland Colonization Journal from Mr. Latrobe of Baltimore, Oct. 1851.
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Again, I would quote in support of my position a few facts from Mr. Latrobe's letter :—he is speaking of the effect of competition between the two races—"In Baltimore, ten years since, the shipping at Fell's Point was loaded by free coloured stevedores ; the labour at the coal-yards was free coloured labour. In the rural districts round Bal timore, the principal city of a slave state, free coloured labourers, ten years ago, got in the harvest, worked the mine banks, made the fences, and indeed supplied, to a great extent, all agricultural wants in this respect. Now all this is changed. The white man stands in the black man's shoes—or else is fast getting into them. In Cincinnati, the labour that used to be performed by free blacks in the great pork establishments, is now performed by white men. The firemen on the steam-boats on the western waters are now whites, where they used to be free coloured men ; and the negro's song, as he filled his furnaces, has ceased on the Ohio and Mississippi."
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So, dating the death of the steamboat firemen's songs to the turn of the 1850s and saying that much of the free Black labor – at which time Whites would have worked relatively "side by side"—was in the 1840s. That's the decade in which I believe we see the burgeoning of chanties.