Black women and the cultural performance of music in mid-nineteenth century Natchez

ABSTRACT

Anna and Kate Johnson’s experiences typify that of thousands of women who lived in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. In this microhistory of Anna and Kate and performativity among Black women living in a slave state, I expose the evidence of their lived experiences outside the metanarrative of music history in the United States. With the acknowledgment that middle-class Blacks adopted social customs used by whites, and confirmation through the artifacts that might confirm this practice, this essay introduces Black women and others into a more inclusive and honest narrative of social music practices in the nineteenth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Black
• women
• performativity
• microhistory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This paper would not have been possible without the gracious assistance of Dale Cockrell, who shared his notes on the Johnson women’s music before I traveled to Baton Rouge myself.

These women wrote their names in many places on their music. Baptized “Ann Johnson,” all her signatures are “Anna,” which Kate and her parents used in their records. At some point she added a middle initial “L” and on a few signatures it looks like “Lee.” She later used “Johnston” on occasion. Kate’s baptismal record spells her name with a “C.” Baptism documents in William Johnson Family Papers, LSU.

2 Upward mobility is one of the points I make throughout Unbinding Gentility.

3 Modern studies of African American music in the antebellum United States do not tend to consider such practices, probably because the sources were unknown at the time they were written. Literature on the bandleader Francis Johnson (1792–1844) is an exception.

4 The concept of “free” is not as simple as it might seem. Several scholars have commented on uncertainties concerning the rights of people of color in the antebellum South. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers considers the issue generally in Forging Freedom, 1–19; and Gary B. Mills looks at regional specificities in “Shades of Ambiguity,” 164–65.

5 Henri Bertini, Méthode complète et progressive de piano (ca. 1840), published as Bertini’s Piano Method Complete (Cleveland: Brainard, n.d.).

6 I discuss the term “Black gentility” in “Music and Black Gentility in the Antebellum and Civil War South” and in Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 46–9, 194–6.

7 The question of how their activities might compare with those of women in the North is too large to be addressed in detail here. Preliminary research points to some differences between Northern and Southern music collecting during the 1850s and 1860s, but a definitive study requires an assessment of potentially hundreds of thousands of bound volumes of music (what musicologists call binder’s volumes). I have personally examined over four thousand such collections, of which approximately two thirds have a Southern provenance. The evidence in such volumes often contradicts long-held assumptions, such as the circulation of patriotic music during the Civil War. In my American Musicological Society/Library of Congress lecture of 2021, I discuss the fact that women’s collections do not support the emphasis that modern historians have placed on patriotic music of the Civil War.

8 This discourse aligns with Judith Butler’s definition of performativity: “Language, gesture, and all manner of social sign” create an illusion of social reality. “Performative Acts and Gender Construction,” 519. Furthermore, she writes, performativity is a “discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names”; in this article, that is gentility. Bodies That Matter, 13.

9 Although Richard Bushman did not use the term “codes” in The Refinement of America, he was among the first to foreground social aspiration under the concept of gentility.

10 Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 93 and 101. She attributes this phenomenon to the middle class, but elite women took part in the same type of performances. See Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 9–10.

11 See, for example, Ellis and Forst, “Songs of the South,” 175–6.

12 Among the studies that deal with this subject are Fitchett’s “The Traditions of the Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina”; Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South; Gould, ed., Chained to the Rock of Adversity; Alexander, Ambiguous Lives; Ribianszky, “Tell Them that My Dayly Thoughts are with Them”; Reynolds, “Wealthy Free Women of Color in Charleston, South Carolina During Slavery”; Powers, Black Charlestonians:; Obernuefemann, “Crossing Invisible Lines”; West, “‘Between Slavery and Freedom’”; Spruill, et al, eds. South Carolina Women; Spruill, et al, eds. Mississippi Women; Bolsterli, Kaleidoscope; Gaspar and Hine, eds., Beyond Bondage.

13 See, for example, Karpf’s “‘As with Words of Fire’.”

14 Edwin Adams Davis references this phenomenon in Johnson, The Barber of Natchez, 92.

15 See, for example, E. Francis White’s influential Dark Continent of Our Bodies; Harris, “Gatekeeping and Remaking”; and Cananau, Constituting Americanness.

16 Cobb, Picture Freedom, Introduction; and “‘Forget Me Not’,” 40–1.

17 Ribianszky, “‘Tell Them that My Dayly Thoughts are with Them,’” 702. This does not separate them completely from Cobb’s observations on intersectionality, however. Ties between southern Blacks (legally manumitted or not) who lived in Philadelphia and the Southern states remained strong throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Relevant to this article are the daughters of Sarah Martha Sanders (1815–50) and her enslaver, Richard Walpole Cogdell, in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Sarah died in 1850, Richard saw that their children were removed to Philadelphia as violence towards enslaved and free Blacks increased in the decade before the Civil War. Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 45–6, and 229n; and Myers, Forging Freedom, 160. On William’s rule about parties, see Cockrell, “William Johnson,” 9.

18 The park’s website is https://www.nps.gov/natc/learn/historyculture/williamjohnson.htm. There is no doubt as to the identity of William’s father, but Ann’s is less certain. Gould, Chained to the Rock of Adversity, p. liii. Her mother was Harriet Battles, a mixed-race woman, and her father may have been Tichenor, the white planter who freed Harriet and Ann in 1826. For details on this event, see Martha Swain, et al, Mississippi Women, 28; see also Ribianszky, “Johnson, Ann Battles.”

19 Bailey, “Music in the Life of a Free Black Man of Natchez”; Cockrell, “William Johnson”; Johnson, The Barber of Natchez.

20 Cockrell’s essay concisely situates William economically within the South’s social structure and, more expansively, contextualizes music in his life.

21 Ribianszky, “Johnson, Ann Battles.”

22 See Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 34–9.

23 I explore these various types of sources and their advice or descriptions of musicking in Candace Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle, especially pp. 15–5, 43.

24 On this practice, see Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 15, 19, 28–30, 54, 67, 140–41.

25 See Mary Stedman’s idealized woman’s figure in Bailey, “Binder’s Volumes as Musical Commonplace Books,” 461.

26 Such sources include Patricia Brady, “Free Black Artists in Antebellum New Orleans”; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne; and David Bindman, et al., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art.

27 Three months later, on 11 April, he noted that he had received a letter from New Orleans that informed him “that my Little Anna did not make her Speech at the Examination as was Expected She would, Thus I am Disappointed.” Quoted in Johnson, The Barber of Natchez, 84–85.

28 L’Abeille, 7 April 1853, p. 1, col. 10; quoted in John Baron, New Orleans, 99.

29 His son, William, advertised with his brother in 1861 that they were opening a new barbershop in a space formerly used by a Mr. Grodel for music lessons. Natchez Daily Courier 21 November 1861. Gould provides the fullest account of the Miller and Johnson women in Chained to the Rock of Adversity.

30 These include popular works by Henry Bishop, Henry Russell, and Thomas Moore.

31 See Bailey, “‘Remember Those Beautiful Songs’,” 263–302; Cobb, “‘Forget Me Not,’” 32–4.

32 William Johnson diary, William Johnson Family Papers.

33 August, September, October, and November, and again on January 15, 1856. [30 August 1855, and 30 September 1855.]

34 The dates are February 2 and 27, March 27, and April 2, 1855.

35 Such interactions are documented throughout Johnson, The Barber of Natchez for example, p. 94. On the home’s location, p. 98.

36 Bailey, “Music in the Life,” 9. The only music teachers that I have definitively been able to place in Natchez around this time are Jacob Chur, who was there in the 1830s, left during the Civil War, and returned to the city to teach piano in 1865 (October 3, 1836, August 15, 1865 Natchez Daily Courier), as did Charles G. Stone (June 10, 1865 Natchez Daily Courier); Prof. Jules Karaklits, who had studied at the Paris Conservatory (November 19, 1857 Natchez Daily Courier); and Professor James Woodruff (November 11, 1857 Natchez Daily Courier). Ella Sheppard, the famous accompanist and soprano of the first iteration of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and first Black faculty member at Fisk University, studied music in Cincinnati with a white French singer, Caroline Rivé, but she asked Sheppard to enter through the backstairs so no one would know they mingled. Gustavus D. Pike, The Jubilee Singers, 52.

37 She and two brothers later attended Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts (see “Thomas Day’s Letter”). Miss Nancy H. Goldsbury was the music teacher in this year. David Sherman, History of the Wesleyan Academy, 247. The 1850 US census for Wilbraham shows both Mary Ann and Thomas, Jr. in this school, but Mary Ann is the only with an “M” beside her name for race (“Mulatto”); all others are blank, suggesting white.

38 On Sanders, see Receipt Book 1, SCSVP, B2/F1/D1 at LCP (from Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, “Negotiating Women,” 186, 191n); On Delue, Charles Izard Manigault to Charles H. Manigault, October 1, 1846, in “Letterbook 1846–47,” South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina. More context for these and other cross-racial music instruction can be found in Bailey, Unbinding Gentility, 35–49.

39 Black men also taught music in the antebellum South, and several can be traced to Mississippi: Furvelle De Pontis, McDonald Reponey, and P.A. Rivarde appear as “mulattos” in the census. Rivarde composed “When Love is Kind” (published in New York in 1869) and “Entreat Not” (Chicago, 1883). Composer C.B. Hawley studied with him. In Bayou Teche, Louisiana, Professor Baptiste Mortaba taught Belazaire Meullion, the daughter of a Black planter, in the early 1850s, but whether this is music has yet to be discerned. Meullion Family Papers, LSU Special Collections.

40 Ribianszky, “‘Tell Them that My Dayly Thoughts,” 701.

41 Johnson, The Barber of Natchez, xxiii–xxiv.

42 William L. Andrews, introduction to Johnson, The Barber of Natchez, ix.

43 All except “Roy’s Wife and We’re a’ nodden’” were advertised together in the 1855 New York Musical Review and Gazette, vol. 6 (p. 128).

44 See Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle, 96–100.

45 On this cultural education, see Bailey, “Binder’s Volumes as Musical Commonplace Books.”

46 Why the Stockton volume is in the collection remains a mystery.

47 Cockrell first makes this claim in “Barber,” 9.

48 An H.K. Bell from Natchez fought at the Battle of Chickamauga in fall 1863. Chickamauga after battle report: Report of Lieut. Col. James Barr, Tenth Mississippi Infantry. October 4, 1863.

49 For example, 19 November 1864. “Leila was up hear Monday she seemed in high spirits.”

50 Rose, baptized in 1850, later married William A. Diers.

51 Gould, Chained to the Rock, 77n.

52 William was a Democratic supporter. Cockrell, “Barber,” 9–10.

53 On Nora Gardiner, see Bailey, “Remember Those Beautiful Songs.”

54 “The Major” was Major Minor, a free Black man from Mississippi who had enlisted with the 64th United States Colored Infantry Regiment. He also applied to the Southern Claims Commission for losses and was denied. Gary B. Mills, Southern Loyalists in the Civil War, 435. See also Reginald Washington, “Genealogy Notes,” 12–18.

55 Katherine Johnson Diary, 1 November 1864, William Johnson Family Papers, Vol. 31.

56 Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle, 19–20, 43–4.

57 I used this image in Unbinding Gentility, 42.

58 Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” 271.

59 Gould, Chained to the Rock, xxii.

60 See Leslie, Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson.

61 That her later music remains as individual pieces reflects the material history of the end of the century, which saw the decline of binder’s volumes as complete collections of music became readily available.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Candace L. Bailey

Candace L. Bailey, The work of musicologist Dr. Candace Bailey, Neville Distinguished Professor of the Visual and Performing Arts at North Carolina Central University, has been supported by grants and fellowships from several entities, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research interprets music in women’s culture of the nineteenth century, particularly in the southern United States.