When Sound Mattered

Richard Cullen Rath.How Early America Sounded. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 227 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.50.

I finished this review sitting in a university hospital corridor, waiting for a loved one to open her eyes after surgery. Hospitals are visually antiseptic, but aurally rich environments. If modern critics of our sensory deprivation are right, all I should have heard would be the quiet hum of machines. Instead, my ears were pounded by the cries of the hurting patients, the ringing of all kinds of bells, sharp pinging noises from malfunctioning IVs, joking among the aides and the nurses, whispered conferences among the residents and medical students, and a variety of squeaks, bangs, thumps, and whines to which I could give no meaning. It must have been this way long ago, when sound mattered.

Forget for a moment about books, historians, libraries, and reviews. Close your eyes and open your ears. Imagine "how early America sounded." Day and night made a world of difference. Today, we hear machines day and night—cars and trucks rumble, appliances hum, and electronics cackle. Then, the day was full of the sounds of people at work talking, shouting, singing, groaning, and cursing. Farm animals conversed aloud in their own tongues. Everyplace had its own characteristic sounds—or, as Richard Rath calls them, soundscapes. In the village one could hear the metal-ringed wheels of wagons clanking. At the city shipyards the noise level could be deafening. In the Indian town men and women told stories and sang, and children ran about as noisily as they could. When the militia or the regulars drilled, the banging of musket fire was as loud a modern jet planes. In the night, well, the night belonged to the bestiary. Wolves howled, panthers shrieked, owls and other nocturnal fliers called to one another. Insects, frogs, and other small things added a barrage of sounds to the night. Natural sounds—of rain, wind, thunder, and watercourses—had a power that we remember when we go hiking or camping.

Every sound had meaning assigned to it. Indians knew that animals were not only creatures of flesh and bone, but avatars of powerful spirits. The bells of the New England church steeple were not just tones; they called to worship, warned of fire, and sang the hours. The singing of psalms in the meetinghouse and the ribald songs in the tavern signified different kinds of gatherings but their purposes were well known to those who attended. The slaves' playing at drums or fiddling sent messages that other slaves could decode.

Early America was a world full of sound, and Richard Rath insists in his provocative, evocative, stimulating book that we can recover some of those sounds and decode them. But his contribution is far more than a catalogue of sounds from our past. He has selected certain of these sounds for special attention, in part because understanding them allows us to re-hear a world of soundways that has been hidden from us for many years, and in part because he has a bone to pick with those who insist that sound must bow to sight.

Noteworthy books in history offer new interpretations, present newly uncovered materials, or teach us to sense the past in new ways. Richard Rath's revised dissertation on soundways in early America does all three. The new interpretation of religious worship, slavery, Indian relations, and other familiar topics is part of a rising genre of sensory histories. These take the primary materials of American history and read them for the raw sensate content, trying to get behind the words to the things they represent. Rath calls this "synesthesia," and it is not as hard as it sounds (p. x). But the reader has to "go beyond the page"—a flat and silent text—to imagine what people in the past heard, for "Sound mattered" in ways it no longer does (pp. x, 2). For Rath, well trained in music theory...