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  • The Sound of Antebellum Reform
  • Karl Hagstrom Miller (bio)
Scott Gac. Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth- Century Culture of Antebellum Reform. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 328 pp. Appendix, notes, and index. $45.00.

When is an abolition song not an abolition song? When it is heard as an ode to familial love or a declaration of American distinctiveness, a crass commercial ploy or an evocation of the Swiss Alps. Scott Gac’s elegant and provocative portrait of the famous antislavery musicians, the Hutchinson Family Singers, reveals both the power and the limitations of music as a political tool within the reform movements of the 1840s. Many listeners embraced—or rejected—the explicit calls for abolition in the family’s words, identifying the group’s music, for better or worse, as a novel form of political polemic. Others paid little heed to such lyrics, connecting instead with the variety of other messages or associations they heard in the groups’ performances. The Hutchinsons worked to develop a unified cadre of activists through song. To their possible consternation, they often forged a mere audience, a heterogeneous crowd brought together more by a shared appreciation for the family’s music than by a common interpretation of it.

Popular music scholars have been grappling with the matter of musical meaning for quite some time. In his now seminal 1981 study, Simon Frith evoked a growing consensus when he argued that “ideological meaning was decided in the process of consumption” rather than the production of music.1 The floodgates have since opened wide, and few scholars are willing to limit their interpretation of popular songs to the willful intent of authors or performers. Consumers, or listeners, forge their own interpretations of what they hear. Identifying a particular meaning for a piece of music—long acknowledged as the most abstract of the arts—is slippery business. Authorial intent provides a starting place, but such interpretive fetters must be loosed once the sounds are let out into the air. This may be true particularly when attempting to discern the historical relationship between music and politics. Indeed, Frith and others pushed to open up the interpretive possibilities of popular music in order to identify culture as a primary site of political struggle. Pop tunes might do important work forging collective identities, tapping collective [End Page 374] memories, voicing dissent or imagining utopias even as they remain explicit odes to puppy love or dancing in the street. The most literal interpretation, Frith suggested, may not be the most historically significant.

Gac is well aware of these concerns. His narrative charts myriad overlapping contexts and connotations of the family’s music. “The rise of the Hutchinson Family Singers in the 1840s reveals a complex interaction of personal ambition, religion, reform, and consumerism alongside an antislavery network buttressed by influential leaders, a vast media, and a growing following,” he writes (p. 24). Yet Gac’s project is quite different from that of most popular music scholars. Rather than divining the political meanings of ostensibly apolitical pop, he attempts to identify the constellation of interpretations surrounding explicitly political songs. He largely succeeds.

The Hutchinson brothers started out to be singers rather than activists. John, Asa, and Josiah Hutchinson began the 1840s in dire straits. The progeny of a struggling farm family unable to bequeath land to fourteen siblings, they imagined a singing group could provide alternative employment. In 1841, they left their parents’ farm in Milford, New Hampshire, a site of growing abolitionist activities, and moved to Lynn, Massachusetts. There they attempted to launch singing careers while working at their older brother’s grocery store. They found little initial success, hampered by both their tentative performances and, Gac explains, by a common American preference for European over homegrown musicians. They pleaded on an early handbill, “When foreigners approach your shores, You welcome them with open doors, Now we have come to seek our lot, Shall native talent be forgot” (p. 130)? They eventually overcame such prejudice by shaping themselves after the Rainer Family, one of the most popular European acts to tour the States.

By the time the Rainer Family from the Tyrol landed in the...

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