Old Folks’ Singing and Utopia: How Abolitionist Musical Antiquarianism and Calvinist Eschatology Gave Birth to Science Fiction on the Banks of the Connecticut River

The “old folks’ concerts” (OFCs) of the mid-nineteenth century comprised what is, no doubt, the only American musical craze ever started by senior citizens. By the winter of 1856, these public performances—centered on old, white Yankees singing old Yankee sacred music in old Yankee costume—had become so popular that a front-page headline in the Boston Herald declared the phenomenon an “epidemic.” Through a subtle connection to mainstream Calvinist Congregationalist beliefs and practices relating to the Christian millennium and apocalypse, the backward-looking old folks’ concerts had a direct impact on the emergence of a particularly New English brand of forward-looking, speculative fiction, in the work of one former Congregationalist minister-in-training from Chicopee, Massachusetts—Edward Bellamy.

Let us begin the story of this curious connection with a scrap of paper from a Connecticut River town twenty miles downstream from Hartford: Notice of a “Colored Old Folks’ Concert” in the Middletown Constitution of May 7, 1862, a Wednesday. Lead stories that day included the propagation of currants, a dinner at Windsor Castle, and the flocking of enslaved people from Maryland to the recently emancipated District of Columbia. “If our citizens want to hear some old fashioned music by people who know how to sing, and want to see some ancient costume, they can do it on Thursday night,” said the notice.

The following day, some thirty black members of Hartford’s Methodist Episcopal Zion and Talcott Street Congregational churches, old and young, traveled to Middletown, quite possibly aboard the comfortable steamship Hartford en route to Old Saybrook (although these singers would have been relegated to the weather deck, due to their insufficiently European ancestry).

SS Hartford

McDonough Opera House

That night the singers took the stage before a large, ethnically diverse audience at the popular, thousand-plus-capacity McDonough Opera House on the southeast corner of Court and Main Streets, now the site of the Italian restaurant Amici Grill.

In keeping with old folks’ choirs before them, their music came from the heyday of New England’s earliest native-born composers, roughly 1770 to 1810, a group that included William Billings, the first to publish a book entirely composed of his own compositions. Unlike the more restrained music heard in most area churches at midcentury, the old folks’ music, often sung “with the speed of darting cavalry” (Gilman 36), had a sense of abandon, a groove, and a tumbling melodic drive that Harriet Beecher Stowe likened to an “ocean aroused by stormy winds, when deep calleth unto deep in tempestuous confusion” (Stowe 56) Long maligned by reformers and shunned from church services, the music’s reemergence in public life was part of what made the OFCs so exciting to antebellum people.

Also in keeping with common practice, the Colored Old Folks dressed in colonial costume, almost certainly homemade and reportedly “brilliant and in keeping with the parts represented” (Republican 4). While the OFCs originated in a simple performance of ancient sacred music by senior citizens in 1853, by 1862 most were costumed affairs, following the lead of semiprofessional touring troupes like that of Robert “Father” Kemp, by far the most famous of the bunch. The “parts represented” included a jumble of familiar Yankee types and historical figures: a spectacled grandmother with her knitting, a yokel farmer, Continental soldiers and, ubiquitously, the king and queen of honorary Yankees, George and Martha Washington. That reviewers noted nothing unusual about the group’s dress suggests that these were also the parts the Colored Old Folks represented.

Led by Mr. J. F. Hazard and “Professor” Perry Davis, these singers of African, European, and Algonquian ancestry included in their repertoire Massachusetts composer Jezamiah Sumner’s 1798 patriotic “Ode on Science,” a sprawling and notoriously difficult representative of the early New England repertoire, awash with high notes, tricky florid bits, and a melodic range rivaling that of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It is...