Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS277 suffrage signaled their desertion of the Radical Republicans and their willingness to abandon the freedmen to their former masters. One might well ask what was "apocalyptic" about all this? What did their scriptural perspective give the clergy that was denied to less favored individuals left to struggle with the flux of events without benefit of divine insight? Moorhead's survey is restricted to Congregationalist , Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist sources. Missing from his analysis is a sociology designed to bridge the large gap between the millennialist tradition and the substansive interpretations of events offered by the representatives of the moderate, middle-of-the-road denominations. We know from Lewis Perry's work that radical abolitionists could draw very different lessons from Scripture. But the abolitionists' denominational connections were tenuous, and their theological grounding was in radical versions of perfectionism rather than millennialism. At the descriptive level Moorhead's book is detailed and informative, but because it slights an analysis of the social affiliations and commitments of the clergy it cannot provide explanations of their rather feckless responses to the great events of the time. Stow Persons University of Iowa Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War. By Dena J. Epstein. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Pp. xiv, 433. $17.95.) Dena Epstein's long-awaited survey of the literature of Afro-American folk music up to the publication of Shve Songs of the United States in 1867 is exhaustive in its coverage of printed sources—diaries, letters, travel accounts, and slave narratives. The bibliography of printed sources requires forty pages of fine print. Her coverage of manuscript sources, newspapers, and the Federal Writers Project ex-slave interviews is less complete, and she acknowledges that further investigation would doubtless yield invaluable historical evidence. The work should perhaps be supplemented by an examination of Roger Abraham's and John Szwed's Afro-American Folk Culture: An Annotated Bibliography (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1977). Sinful Tunes and Spirituals is excellent also in its description of types of black music, the social contexts of its black musical performance, of performance style and associated instruments over a very long time span. She establishes with solid historical data the continuity between Africa and Afro-American musical culture. Unfortunately, the magnificent breadth of the work has not been achieved without a cost in depth. Epstein's lack ofdeep familiarity with each of her sources produces some geographic gaffes, such as mislocating a rural black congregation in Charleston, when it actually existed 278CIVIL WAR HISTORY nearly seventy miles north in All Saints Parish (p. 214), simply because the source was a letter written in Charleston. Similarly, she failed to recognize that a slave fiddler observed in Conwayboro, Horry County (not Norry County), S. C, was actually a visitor from a Georgetown County rice plantation somethirtymiles to the south—an area demographically , socially, and culturally quite different from Horry County. Among other things, such mislocations obscure the process of transmission of black music from one locale to another. More serious is the problem of her use of Caribbean sources. Under the influence of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, Epstein searched the literature of the West Indies for descriptions of black music, dancing, and instruments. Unfortunately, she uses the material analogously, rather than comparatively. She assumes that mainland black music must have been like Caribbean black music, butbecause of the "slow growth rate of the black population" on the mainland, their music "made little impact on travelers and other witnesses" (p. xvi). It would seem to be at least as plausible that demographic differences between the mainland and the Caribbean influenced patterns of musical development as much as it did patterns of traveler's observation. Perhaps the most serious weakness of the book is Epstein's failure to draw upon the vast theoretical literature of fofkloristics, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and linguistics. As a result, her handling of such questions as "African survivals" and "acculturation" is simplistic, static, and less than satisfactory. These analytical reservations are not mere quibbles, for Epstein has attempted to write an analytical book. But they do obscure the nature and magnitude of her achievement. She is neither folklorist, anthropologist , nor ethnomusicologist...