Content area
Full Text
When Steve McQueen’s film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 slave narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, appeared in 2013, it was accompanied by a soundtrack album of music “from and inspired by” the movie. Executive producer John Legend combined selections from the film score, spirituals, and new material from contemporary artists to impressive ends: “12 Years a Slave Leads Contemporary Soundtrack Revival,” announced Billboard Magazine (Gallo).1 But 160 years before Music from and Inspired by 12 Years a Slave, the book came with its own soundtrack. At the end of the narrative, Northup, a talented violinist, includes a musical score: a setting of a song called “Roaring River” that, as he recounted earlier in the book, he heard enslaved people on the Red River plantation singing as they patted juba at a Christmas celebration (Fig. 1). The study of slave narratives has been profoundly shaped by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s argument that its foundational trope is the “talking book,” a set piece in which the not-yet-print-literate narrator puts ear to book to see if it will talk (127-69). With “Roaring River,” however, Twelve Years a Slave asks us also to consider the meaning of a “singing book.”
Fig. 1.
“Roaring River; A Refrain of the Red River Plantation,” in Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853).
Once we attune ourselves to the voices as well as the words of slave narratives, its surprising how much music they make. In the Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), Brown (who also edited the antislavery songster The Anti-Slavery Harp) illustrates a harrowing description of a woman’s child being sold away from her by inserting a song that he recalls having “often heard the slaves sing, when about to be carried away to the South” (51).2 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) not only expatiates on the songs of enslaved people but also ends with its own song, a thirteen-verse parody of the Southern hymn “Heavenly Union.” Ashon Crawley has shown how “sound reverberates throughout” Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), where it becomes the “residue and materiality of thought that memory refuses to forget” (33). Noting how both Douglass...