The Mythical Musical Boatmen: Integrating National Icons in Antebellum American Culture

That night, a steam boat came up along shore and someone on the upper guard by the ladies cabin was playing a flute. It being night and still (only the rumbling of the boat) the mingling of the rumbling, splashing and music, I thought it very nice. Music on the water is always nice.

—Tom Collins (1832-1907), boatman

Tom Collins's life flowed around rivers. As a teenager living along the Ohio River, he made the most of his location near a sandbar during low-river stages. When steamboats ran aground, Tom would row frantically to the stranded passengers to sell them food. Near the end of his life, when reminiscing about these early riverside days, he recalled, "When we went out to a boat that had a lot of these hungry passengers aboard, about fifty or more would be hollering at once to buy. Dutch, Irish, French, Italians, English, Welch and niggers, all yelling at once … all talking at once, all holding their money at once and all wanted to be served first. It was like a crowd around a ticket wagon at a circus show, only the crowd was a more heterogeneous mess of beings." Tom eventually gave up his opportunistic river trade and plied the Mississippi as a flatboatman, later building and piloting boats himself and often commenting on the diverse origins of his fellow riverine laborers. He carried a fiddle as one of his few possessions on his journeys. Fiddling proved useful for Tom, as well as entertaining for his mates. Once he received a discounted fare from a clerk on a journey back upriver. Tom rejoiced that for "just making it ring … he let me go for the dollar." Tom also mentioned hearing the music of others on the river. He recalled the sounds of the flute and the unfamiliar bagpipe, and he sought out the music of the slaves working along the river. The sounds of this "heterogeneous mess of beings" who traveled the river, as well as the sounds of the diverse population who lived and worked along the Mississippi River, especially the sounds that seemed most alien, struck not only Tom Collins but also other river workers and travelers.¹

As the above vignette suggests, a diverse array of people lived, worked, and traveled along the interior waterways of North America during the first half of the nineteenth century. Those who lived riverside between St. Louis and New Orleans, a region commonly referred to as the lower Mississippi River Valley, witnessed and facilitated drastic political, economic, and demographic shifts, as well as the inevitable cultural changes that followed in their wake. They populated part of a larger regional West that was distinct from, yet loosely attached to, the rest of the nation—a nation struggling to define itself during these decades of drastic change. Because of this, historians can use popular assumptions expressed about the region, both from outside the region and from within the region itself, to consider some of the anxieties Americans felt about their own identity. The most regionally distinctive characters, the Mississippi River boatmen, became navigational icons by which others could gauge their own places within the chaotic currents of the antebellum United States. As Tom Collins's story also suggests, the river was awash in sound—most notably, the peculiar sounds of the boatmen. This diverse group of waterborne workers was considered to be naturally musical, an assumption that is grounded in the historical reality of shipboard labor. An examination of both the actual and the imagined musically inclined Mississippi River boatmen, as documented in firsthand recollections and the associated popular culture versions, reveals a nation struggling to come to terms with ethnic, racial, and regional diversity within the context of a rapidly changing world.²

The boatmen, like the rest of the lower Mississippi River Valley population during the early nineteenth century, were ethnically and racially diverse, and their music contained strands of African, European, and Indigenous American traditions. Americans integrated these diverse sounds, even if inadvertently, as their own when they incorporated the mythical musical boatmen into...