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

In the archives at Louisiana State University are two bound volumes and several boxes of sheet music that belonged to two young women, Anna Lee Johnson (1841–1922) and Katharine “Kate” Geraldine Johnson (1842–1909), who grew up in Natchez during the mid-nineteenth century.¹ These two women lived in their family’s home on State Street, where their prosperous father not only ran a series of businesses but also lent money to people in the city. Their mother remained at home, performing the duties associated with the wives of middle-class businessmen. Their parents sent Anna to school in New Orleans when she was six years old, had a piano and other instruments in the house, and purchased the music preserved in this collection. After their father’s untimely death in 1851, their mother provided several of the children, including Anna and Kate, with music lessons at home. During the Civil War, the young women of the house entertained soldiers in the family parlor, and after it they worked as teachers in local primary schools.

In all of this, their experiences typify those of thousands of women who lived in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. But Anna and Kate were Black women living in a slave state, a fact that places their lived experiences outside the metanarrative of music history in the United States. Scholars tend to draw a distinct line between those who read music (a practice subsumed under “scientific music”) and those who did not. We have recognized that whites sought musical accomplishment and all its associated cachet in order to fit into a self-determined social sphere or, as I have argued elsewhere, to move into a higher one.² In contrast, scholars have associated Black people only with oral traditions, an assumption that betrays a further supposition that most Blacks were illiterate.³ Professional musicians who traveled in non-slave states, such as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, constituted exceptions to this rule, and they were few.

Turning this belief around, admitting the possibility that middle-class (and even lower-class or enslaved) Blacks adopted social customs used by whites, and seeking the artifacts that might confirm this practice, introduces Black women and others into a more inclusive and, in fact, honest narrative of social music practices in the mid-nineteenth century. This essay focuses on the Johnson family, a prosperous free Black family who lived in Natchez, as an exemplar for this approach.⁴ I incorporate evidence written into diaries and day books and on the sheet music itself to demonstrate that two daughters in this family, Anna and Kate (Catherine), participated in the same cultural practices as contemporary white women (and possibly with white women whose signatures and music appear in the collection). Their repertory mirrors that found in other bound volumes of the period: music for piano, guitar, and voice; opera in various arrangements; many dances; and popular songs. It also implies agency, with a preference for dance music published with images.

Anna and Kate Johnson exchanged music with friends and inherited music from older female family members. They played piano in the parlor for dancing, and potential suitors were aware of their accomplishments and requested such. The collection evinces a penchant for publications with famous dancers clad in exotic costumes, and other preserved images invite speculation as to how these young women literally saw themselves in the genteel tradition associated with musical accomplishment. A piano instruction book by Henri Bertini confirms the method by which they learned to play the piano, and Kate writes in her diary of performances on both piano and guitar, as well as singing.⁵ Anna continued to subscribe to music magazines and purchase new music into the next century, a practice that implies a lifelong appreciation for the art. Their use of music in the 1860s, in particular, illustrates how it simultaneously constituted and reflected their social position as members of the Black gentility.⁶

What follows is a microhistory. I examine the music collection of two women in the context of their social and cultural milieu, focusing on about a decade of musical practice. Contingencies of place and time contribute substantially to this reading of extant material documents, as do the types of resources themselves and the circumstances surrounding their acquisition and preservation. Contextualization through synchronous experiences of other women will help discern the degree to which Anna and Kate Johnson’s experiences reflect or contrast with other women’s use of music in the performance of culture. This, in turn, will inform whether we understand them as exceptional women in the antebellum U.S. South.⁷

The concept of performativity, loosely based on Judith Butler’s work, is another facet of this study.⁸ I interpret music in women’s culture as a performed social sign. That people living in the United States during the 1850s employed cultural codes in their aspiration to respectability and gentility has been a regular feature of scholarly discourse since Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities.⁹ By deliberately enacting the behaviors of the class with which they wished to be associated, women (and men) participated in the rituals attributed to that group. By adopting this hairstyle or that manner of address, they performed culture, and, as Karen Halttunen famously observed, the stage for this performance was the parlor.¹⁰ Music provides perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this behavior because women literally and figuratively performed culture when they stood in front of an approved private audience and sang or played an instrument. Moreover, since all surviving texts pertain to white culture, scholars have described this as the cult of white respectability politics.¹¹ How Blacks adopted, adapted, and reshaped the signs of white respectability to their own purposes is yet another field of inquiry of the present topic.

My work on the Johnson family contributes to ongoing conversations about the lives of Black people in the United States in the nineteenth century. For more than a century, scholars of southern history and culture have exhumed data from various sources to situate free Blacks within the slaveholding South, although none deal with music in detail. Among those that inspired the current study are those who look at wealthy property owners (Powers, Ribianszky, and Reynolds), those concerned with family life and relationships (Obernuefemann), and those who explore women’s lives (Gould, Alexander, West). Without these studies my work on the Johnson family would be vastly incomplete. They portray and interpret the complicated lives of women who made their lives under conditions existing nowhere else in the country.¹²

I have adopted the term “Black gentility” as a means of understanding how Blacks used the system of signs espoused by works such as Emily Thornwell’s The Lady’s Guide to Complete Gentility: In Manners, Dress and Conversation, in the Family, in Company, at the Pianoforte, the Table, in the Street, and in Gentlemen’s Company …  (Philadelphia, 1838) as a means of social distinction. I am not the first to do so.¹³ In the past few decades, the households of slaveholding free Blacks and people of color have been meticulously examined in terms of economic mobility and biography, and a few authors have considered the social positions of people placed outside the social norm by their supposed skin color or lineage who would nevertheless qualify as at least middle-class based on property alone. My work, based on an ethnographic reading of archival material, constitutes some of the first to elaborate music within these parameters. Since only one music collection has thus far been identified with such a family in the South, a study of their practices necessitates a microhistory, and they might be seen as exceptional. Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that they were part of a larger trend of musically educated women who adhered to a prescribed set of cultural rules in order to reflect their social position.

The published literature available to anyone living in the United States in 1855 was relatively consistent when it came to the rules of social engagement, and aspirational men and women devoured such material in order to maintain their place on or ascend the social ladder. The lived experiences of Black men and women, however, were always different to those of whites, no matter how wealthy they were. Even prosperous slaveholding planter families such as the Ricauds or Métoyers or affluent businesswomen like Eulalie de Mandeville (Cécée Macarty) would be barred from the most prestigious white events or homes.¹⁴ This examination of the Johnson family music collection exposes details of a hidden history by interrogating the intersection of their use of music as a cultural code with the normative expectation of white respectability, thereby revealing at least one Black family’s adaptation of gentility to suit their own purposes.

A wealth of literature exists that evaluates concepts of Blackness and respectability in the antebellum United States. In particular, Jasmine Nichole Cobb’s recent work on visual culture and autograph albums intersects with the issues with which I engage here.¹⁵ Her goal of locating conceptions of Black freedom in the parlor, seeing that space as a place of creation of “visions of Blackness separated from slavery,” reinforces my own findings of the Johnsons’ parlor as a space where Ann and her daughters demonstrated their “fluency” in sentimentalism, yielding them the status of consciously crafted “feeling” beings worthy of sentiment.¹⁶ Like the women Cobb examines, the Johnsons maintained gender decorum in this guise, even if they challenged expectations of race as defined by whites. The Johnsons constitute an especially poignant data resource because, unlike Cobb’s subjects, they resided in the slaveholding South. They also enslaved people themselves, as did a number of their racially mixed but free neighbors. Tellingly, William admonished those under his business umbrella not to attend “darkey parties,” proscribing behavior as he sought to distinguish his social circle.¹⁷

The Johnson family

Anna and Kate were two of ten children (five girls and five boys) born to William Tiler Johnson (1809?−1851) and Ann Battles Johnson (1815–1866). Both parents were born enslaved; both had white fathers. Ann’s mother, Harriet Battles, and William purchased property on State Street in Natchez from the man who had owned Harriet and Ann, Gabriel Tichenor, in 1829, and in 1836 they built the house in which the family eventually lived (now part of a national park).¹⁸ For decades, William’s life story has caught the attention of writers. Several modern publications recognize his stature in the city, including a well-known edition of his diary of 16 years by William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis, a biography by the same authors, and two articles on his musical life: Ben E. Bailey’s “Music in the Life of a Free Black Man of Natchez” and Dale Cockrell’s “William Johnson: Barber, Musician, Parable.”¹⁹ As both authors make abundantly clear, the Johnson family valued music and frequently participated in musicking in their three-story brick home on State Street. William’s musical artifacts included a violin and guitar, and he traveled to New Orleans to hear famous performers. This evidence places his musical experiences well within expectations of middle-class gentility. His economic position bolstered his place in society: when he died in 1851 at the hands of a disgruntled neighbor, he owned an 800-acre plantation, and he had enslaved a total of about 35 people throughout his life.²⁰

Although William’s position in Natchez and his love of music have been acknowledged in recent years, Ann Battles’s experiences and influences have not been mined exhaustively for how she might have contributed to the family’s performance of culture within their social circle. Virginia Meacham Gould’s Chained to the Rock of Adversity (1998) is the only study to examine Ann Battles Johnson in detail, and her work has significantly informed my own. Gould’s focus, however, is on letters and does not contextualize music in detail. In this as in other aspects of their education, Ann must have been a major force in how her children represented themselves to others. After William’s murder, she successfully managed their finances, education, businesses and farm, and continued to oversee the production of clothing in the home, which they sold in Natchez. Detailed and numerous entries in her daybook for cloth, shoes, hoops, ribbons, and related items prove that she kept the children properly attired as befitting their social position. Both parents valued education and saw to the children’s schooling or lessons with private tutors. Not surprisingly, music figured among their accomplishments. Music’s place in the family existed from its beginnings: even before marriage, William and Ann enjoyed attending concerts together, and they sought to instill an appreciation of music performance – both at home and on the stage – in their offspring.²¹

Several items in the unbound portion of the Johnson music collection date from the 1830s and 1840s. Their copy of Leopold Meignen’s “The Guitar / A Serenade” was purchased from Kretschmar & Nunn’s in Philadelphia, a partnership that sold music in the 1830s. Such an early publication probably belonged initially to one of the parents.²² William’s mentions of music in his diary and his affinity for musicking and attending music performances have led scholars to associate them with him; however, there is no reason why some of the items could not have belonged to Ann, since music in the home was specifically assigned to women in etiquette books, newspaper and journal advice columns, and contemporary literature.²³ The name “Anna Johnson” on some of the older pieces, written in a different hand from some of the later inscriptions in the hand of her daughter, substantiates the claim that Ann Battles Johnson had owned some of the music (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1. “My Boyhood Home,” with Anna Johnson’s signature and two drawings of a man. William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 4, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

Figure 2. Detail of drawing of man on top half of Anna Johnson’s copy of “My Boyhood Home.” William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 4, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

As in white families, parents’ music passed down to their children.²⁴ Anna wrote her name on another early print, “My Boyhood Home,” and she probably drew the two pictures of men on it as well. (Figure 2) Many young women drew images on their music or added jewelry or moustaches to printed images on it, and sometimes these reveal idealized models of fashion, bodies, or faces.²⁵ Anna’s two men might be the only Black men drawn onto sheet music from this period and contribute to a growing recognition of nineteenth-century African American art.²⁶ They also suggest that she studied drawing as well as music, as befit a genteel young woman of her class (Figures 1 and 3).

Figure 3. Detail of drawing of man on bottom half of Anna Johnson’s copy of “My Boyhood Home.” William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 4, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

The Johnson children received lessons in typical genteel accomplishments such as French and music either at school or at home. On the 9th of February 1850, William noted that “I Sent $6 to Lavinia Miller this Evening to Pay for Anna’s Schooling. This I think will pay nearly two months or more to Come.”²⁷ Other entries indicate that Anna was in New Orleans, although no extant record confirms which school she attended. Most likely, she went to a day school (six dollars would not cover boarding school for a few months) and lived with her cousin Lavinia while there. She could have matriculated at a number of places, such as that of Madam L. Dumagene, who taught music “pour les jeunes personnes de couleur” at 54 Bourbon Street in 1853.²⁸

Lavinia was the daughter of Adelia, William’s sister, and James Miller, a respected Black barber who moved to Natchez from Philadelphia.²⁹ Correspondence between these families continued for several decades. If “Venena Miller” is Lavinia Miller, then her name occurs several times in the music collection on publications from the 1840s.³⁰ (Figure 4) Southern women frequently shared music with relatives and friends, and this practice of sharing music among members of the Johnson and Miller families further exemplifies how the Johnson family’s use of music mirrored that of their contemporaries throughout the United States; it also confirms Cobb’s observations about expanded social circles being defined through their accomplishments, in her case autograph albums belonging to Black women.³¹ Lavinia also assisted William when he shopped for a piano in Mr. Myers’ store in Natchez on 18 October 1850, further confirming her musical knowledge.³²

Figure 4. “Venena” Miller on sheet music in the William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 2, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

After William’s death in 1851, Anna lived at home, where her instruction continued. In 1855, her mother’s records indicate that she paid for monthly music lessons for “the two girls” in 1855/56.³³ Ann’s notes from February through April 1855 mention paying “Venir” for music and once for French lessons.³⁴ Interestingly, Ann not only paid $5 for Anna and Kate’s music lessons, but she spent money for William’s music lessons and, in March, for French as well. Rarely do payments for music lessons for male family members surface in Southern documents, and here it points to the facts that the Johnson children had no school in the vicinity to attend and that their mother desired all of them to be accomplished. It may also represent a nod to their deceased father’s fondness for musicking. Two years later, on 3 March 1857, Ann paid “Gisper” (Gasper?) $10 to tune the piano for a year.

The identities of these men (none are styled “Miss” or “Mrs.” as a woman would have been) have yet to be proven conclusively, although the circumstances of these transactions imply much more than teaching or tuning. If they were white, they can be added to a well-documented list of white men who visited the Johnson home. The Johnsons lived in the white part of Natchez, hired white overseers, and William, at the very least, interacted with white men such as Dr. Brown or Mr. Gray.³⁵ In his article on William, Ben Bailey suggested that the Johnsons’ music teacher was a white man willing to teach music to young children of color.³⁶ Elsewhere, I have documented several instances of cross-racial instruction in the antebellum South, and will only summarize a few here. In Salem, North Carolina, Christian Friedrich Sussdorff received permission to teach Mary, the daughter of Thomas Day (the famous cabinetmaker, architect, and free Black man who lived in Milton) in 1847.³⁷ James Garcia, a Cuban musician in Charleston, South Carolina, taught piano to Sarah Martha Sanders, an enslaved Black woman, in 1839.³⁸ Garcia eventually moved north; another music teacher, Monsieur Delue, lost clients in Charleston because he was known to instruct “mulatto boys from Cuba.”³⁹ Given William Johnson’s interactions with white men in Natchez, the family could have hired a white music teacher. This seems likely when considered alongside the possibility that one of the daughters’ friends may also have been white, as will be shown below. Thus, it is possible that “Gisper” might have been Gustavus Gasper, a resident of Natchez documented in the 1860s, and “Venir” might refer to Peter Venier, a local grocer from France who possibly taught French and music on the side. Both of these men were white.

William Johnson and his family thrived in the town of Natchez; whether they could have done so in another town in the United States, other than New Orleans, is a complicated question. Unlike some creoles of color in southern Louisiana, the Johnsons did not descend from long-established wealthy families of color. Their history more closely resembles others who made their own way up through the gradations of the middle-class scale common in areas where free Black people were allowed to succeed economically in the slaveholding South. Prosperous Black men and women contributed to the economy of many larger southern towns and cities, and William’s chosen profession, barbering, was a common way to advance a family’s fortunes. Other regional factors heightened William’s opportunities for success. The area along the lower Mississippi and its delta profited from the cotton boom of the 1840s, and new money accompanied the social rise of alternative classes within the South’s culture. Indeed, Nik Ribianszky points to a letter sent to Ann Johnson from her niece, Octavia Miller, as evidence of a “tightly-knit community” with a “small but visible presence in one of the wealthiest slave societies” in the country.⁴⁰ European immigrants such as Venier and Gaspar came to the area in search of financial security, and often they arrived with less sharply honed divisive attitudes toward their business interactions. In all of this, Natchez can be interpreted as another character in the historical drama of the Johnson family story.

The music

The Johnson music collection is one of the largest from the nineteenth-century South. In its present state, it includes three bound volumes of printed sheet music (called “binder’s volumes”), two of which belonged to Anna and Kate, and several boxes each containing multiple folders of sheet music. Most surviving antebellum collections consist only of bound music, but, for some reason, Anna kept the family’s music, which spans almost the entire nineteenth century, together. Davis chronicles the Johnson collection’s 1938–39 path to LSU in his Preface to the original edition of William Johnson’s Diary: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro (1959).⁴¹ Its location during the years between Anna’s death in 1922 and 1938 seem to have been with a family member. William’s diary figures prominently in scholarly discourse on free Blacks in the antebellum period, and while William Andrews noted in his introduction to the 1993 edition that “nothing like William Johnson’s diary exists in the history of antebellum southern or African American letters,” the music collection attracts attention from its exceptional archival value yet non-exceptional contents – which therefore renders it a necessary artifact in any reading of culture in this period.⁴²

The Johnsons cared for their music: many of the single sheets have been sewn together or even pinned to preserve them. (Figure 2) They used it, too, as written-out ornaments, fingerings (Figure 5), drawings, and Anna’s notation that “Oh Bid Not the Heart” is “Good” testify. (Figure 6) Typically for the period, these women collected songs for voice and piano or voice and guitar, and solo pieces for piano. The later items include choral pieces published in journals and books of music. Additionally, there is a copy of Bertini’s piano method book (no date), a binder’s volume that belonged to Aggie Stockton (labeled Volume 1), and parts of a collection of music published in single volumes.

Figure 5. Markings for fingering and ornamentation on “El Jaleo de Jerès.” William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 4, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

Figure 6. Anna’s marking “Good” on “O Bid Not the Heart.” William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 1, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

As a collection, Volume 3 evinces a competent pianist. The music in this binder’s volume dates mostly from the mid-1850s, and the volume could not have been bound before late 1859, when Anna and Kate would have been in their late teens. Bertini’s popular piano method, Volume 4 in the collection, nicely complements the pieces found in Volume 3. Containing only music for solo piano, Volume 3 is, unusually, organized by the composer. After a “Danse espagnole” by Joseph Ascher, the binder’s volume includes three pieces by Charles Voss, five by William Vincent Wallace, five by Carl Czerny, five by Thomas Oesten, and five by Ferdinand Beyer. Compositions by these composers and arrangers frequently occur in Southern collections. Most of Anna’s pieces by Wallace come from well-known publications such as Gems of Scottish Melody, Fantaisie brillante de Salon pour piano sur des Melodies Ecossaises, and A Collection of Favorite Scotch Melodies.⁴³ The Wallace selections acknowledge the vogue for “antique” songs from the British Isles. In the unbound folders from the collection, we find opera transcriptions from Ferdinand Beyer’s Op. 42, the likes of which can also be located in one of Eva Eve’s binder’s volumes (born the same year as Anna, she was a white planter’s daughter living near Augusta, Georgia) and many others.

Volume 2 begins with dances followed by vocal music, all in English (with two additional Italian texts), and mostly from the 1850s. For the most part, the melodic lines are simple, as are the accompaniments. The women included Schubert’s “Serenade” (his Schwanegesang, D. 957, IV: “Ständchen”), a popular Lied that appears in many other collections (such as that of Laura Cooke [1849–1919], the daughter of financier Jay Cooke). Furthermore, the Italian pieces, such as Donizetti’s aria “It is Better to Laugh than Be Sighing” (from Lucrezia Borgia), exist in numerous binder’s volumes of the period, such as those belonging to Ella Criswell and Maggie Wood.

As in the single extant binder’s volume owned by Penelope Pugh, a wealthy planter’s daughter from northeastern North Carolina, dances dominate Volume 2. The Johnsons probably played these polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles at home while their family and friends danced – a common occurrence in Southern antebellum households.⁴⁴ The names of famous dancers, such as Fanny Elssler and Madame Noblet, appear on some of them. The covers suggest a predilection for exotic costumes and gestures that appear foreign, especially what is printed as Spanish. (Figure 7) These suggest a penchant for music of the Other, but it would be overly simplistic to connect the desire for foreign costumes with some sort of self-expression – seeing themselves, free Black women in the slaveholding South as Other. This might be the case, although they may simply have liked “Spanish” music, or flamboyant costumes, or any of numerous explanations. Whatever the reason, the preponderance of images of dancers, combined with a lack of images of singers, marks this binder’s volume (and other loose pieces in the collection) as slightly out of the ordinary, and shows an owner’s fingerprint on the collection – whose fingerprint we cannot say for certain, but almost certainly one of the Johnson sisters, whose names figure prominently in them.

Figure 7. Costumed dancers on “Fanny Elssler’s Quadrilles.” William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 1, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

This sort of agency represents the most typical expression of preference in binder’s volumes, a topic more difficult to fix than one might assume. Who chose the music to be bound often cannot be determined with absolute certainty. Each case must be considered individually, because a father, mother, music teacher, or someone else might have decided the publications that would be displayed in this most prominent artifact of a semi-private activity. Knowing that they would be displayed on a music stand or piano desk for visitors to see, and judge, adults charged with the cultural education of young women made sure they displayed the correct repertory and images.⁴⁵ The Johnsons, however, had less adult oversight than their white (economically situated) counterparts. Their father died years before the music was bound, after which time they did not go to school, and they do not seem to have had particularly close connections to their music teachers (none are mentioned in Kate’s diary). Without these restraints, Kate and Anna could have had a prominent role in selecting their music and choosing which ones to send to the binder’s.

A comparison with Aggie Stockton’s binder’s volume, which forms part of the Johnson music collection now, offers one gauge of how typical this repertory is. The Stockton volume begins with simple songs for voice and piano and ends with 23 dances (polkas, schottisches, marches, and a gallop).⁴⁶ If anything, however, Anna’s music was the more difficult. The only precise overlap between the Johnsons’ binder’s volumes and Stockton’s is “Comin’ through the Rye,” but even here Anna played Wallace’s advanced arrangement and Aggie sang William Dressler’s simple setting for voice and piano. In general, the style of Aggie’s music compares favorably with Johnson Volume 2, but it falls well below the technical requirements needed to play the pieces in Volume 3.

Agnes “Aggie” Josephine Stockton (1840–1917) was born in Natchez to Joseph M. and Ann Stockton (baptized in Trinity Church in 1843). Ann had immigrated from England to the U.S., and Joseph moved to Mississippi from New Jersey; by the 1860 U.S. census, Ann had become head of the household. Agnes married John Spafford Harris in 1870, and they later moved to Colorado and then Montana. Censuses after her marriage list her husband as a “mine owner.” Like Anna Johnson, her economic status was middle-class; although, had Anna been white, socially she would have ranked higher than Aggie. Like Anna, Aggie learned music as an accomplishment befitting a genteel young woman. Aggie’s music does not evince that her music education exceeded that of Anna, rather the opposite. In this, it further underscores the importance of music as a marker of social position for the Johnsons.

As these comparisons with other binder’s volumes demonstrate, the Johnsons’ music is not remarkable for its content. Most collections from the mid-nineteenth-century United States included an assortment of genres. Vocal albums frequently included bel canto or French opera arias (either as they appeared in the opera from which they were taken or simplified in different ways), popular songs of the decade, and famous melodies of the “old country” (by Thomas Moore, for example). Piano volumes’ contents depended on the skill level of the owner, but included dances, variations on popular tunes (which could be “Ben Bolt” or the latest Meyerbeer or Verdi opera), and character pieces (such as the ever-popular “Maiden’s Prayer” by Thekla Badarzewska). Anna and Kate knew the same music as middle-class white women.⁴⁷

The diary

Collectively, Kate’s diary, Ann’s account book, and the music collection divulge some of the Johnson women’s social experiences, many of which mirrored those of young white women in the antebellum South and counter ideas regarding Black musical practices handed down since the nineteenth century. The Johnsons’ evidence shows that they participated in the same cultural practices as other Southern women whose families had the financial means to do so, regardless of skin color. Anna and Kate received music from friends, and not only from Lavinia Miller. H. “Herbie” K. Bell’s name features prominently on several pieces.⁴⁸ Was he the person that Anna noted at the end of Volume 2 when she wrote “Would that I were with thee every day and hour!” Such dialog occasionally appears in other binder’s volumes – whether Anna’s intended saw this remains a mystery.

Leila Bennett is another intriguing associate of the Johnson sisters. One of the loose pieces, “The Lay of Pestal /Yes The Die is Cast and Rest Troubled Heart” (J.R. Ling, NY: Hall & Son) includes her signature. (Figure 8) Katherine's diary from the war years mentions Leila and her sister Rose several times.⁴⁹ Music was an interest the young women shared. On 3 January 1865, Catherine wrote that “Rose Bennett came in and asked for an [illegible]. I was seated at the piano when she came in.” Note that Katherine was seated at the piano when her guests arrived – this is how she passed her time. She also mentions Leila in the same entry. That the women maintained social connections during the war can also be determined from “The Lay of Pestal,” which includes the date of 6 April 1863, again in the hands of one of the Johnsons (the first name is illegible because the pencil lead has faded over time) on the top left and, in ink, “Leila Bennett // Natchez Apr. 6th “63” on the top right, with the same squiggle underneath. The Bennetts may have been white; both Leila and Rose are listed thus in the 1850 U.S. Census, and later censuses do the same.⁵⁰ Gould states that they were free women of color, but provides no documentation for her conclusion.⁵¹

Figure 8. “The Lay of Pestal,” with Johnson and Leila Bennett signatures. William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 2, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

The pencil hand, presumably belonging to Anna or Katherine, has added “Y is the die so cast” under the title. (Figure 9) This is the only piece marked in such a way in this collection. (Most of the pages in the music collection are quite clean, but we should not read too much into that – some young women wrote all over their music, and others not at all.) “The Lay of Pestal” includes the text “Shall I be a slave,” and one cannot fail to consider that the issues of the Civil War and the experiences of young free women of color might have been on their minds when Anna or Kate added this notation to the title. Kate’s diary reveals little of her thoughts on the issue of slavery. Her family owned slaves. In December, she noted that “Why it [the war] was sent upon the land none can tell, it is a subject that baffles me completely.” Unfortunately, that is as specific as she writes.⁵²

Figure 9. Detail from “The Lay of Pestal,” with “Y is the die so cast” in pencil. William T. Johnson Family Papers, Box 2, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.

Like those of many women who lived in the United States during the Civil War period, the Johnson collection contains only a few patriotic pieces. This circumstance stands in opposition to the weight modern authors have placed on music from the war, but, for reasons too numerous to account here, patriotic music does not make up a large percentage of most extant collections. Even more surprising is the fact that the Johnsons, like several others who purchased music in the 1860s, owned both pro-Union and pro-Confederate songs. Again, each occurrence of this phenomenon carries its own story, such as that of Nora Gardiner, who lived in Tennessee but also spent some time in Ohio during the war.⁵³

Music functioned as part of the performance of culture by the Johnson women. Turning again to Katherine's diary, we find a rare description of musical performance in the household, during the Civil War. On 1 November 1864, she commented that “the Major” came by the house for a private “tete a tete” with her, but she did not want to see him in private, so managed to warn family members to stay in the parlor with them.⁵⁴ “He asked for some music [?] that I did not feel in a mood for singing so I took my Guitar and played a few pieces but that did not satisfy him. He wanted me to sing – and I was glad when Ma began a conversation which was kept up until it was time for him to go.”⁵⁵ Several aspects of this event instruct us as to the nature of music in the Johnson household. First, Kate plays the guitar, and she is known as a singer. Second, the Major possibly intends courtship, which Kate wishes to avoid. Music was a part of that ritual, as it was for many young women during this period.⁵⁶ Even more, the Major preferred her to sing – a potentially more intimate activity than playing the guitar because the words could be used to convey feelings that should not be spoken in regular conversation. Fourth, the Major specifically asked for singing, so he had expectations when he joined the family, and he either knew or anticipated that Kate could sing. Finally, her mother, Ann, a formerly enslaved woman who was now managing the family estate, understood the code of conduct in which her daughter chose not to participate. Exactly where Ann learned these codes is unknown, but it is reasonable to speculate that the community in which she moved probably had instilled the performance of genteel culture in her.

Anna and Kate Johnson were not exceptional. Their music collection looks like that of any other woman from the antebellum South whose family’s worth measured in five figures. It includes music for solo piano and solo voice, and the repertory ranges from the simple folk-like songs of the British Isles to arias and dances from popular operas; it includes the popular composers Stephen Glover, Henry Russell, J.P. Ordway, Auber, Wollenhaupt, Oesten, Wallace, Beyer, and Alice Hawthorne. The Johnsons exchanged music with friends and inherited music from older female family members. They played piano in the parlor for dancing, and potential suitors were aware of their accomplishments and requested such.

As a Black family, the Johnsons were also not exceptional. To date, I have culled information on at least seven music collections owned by Black people in the United States during the nineteenth century, as well as other types of data (including dedications to women of color on published sheet music, references to women who received lessons, or data supporting women who performed in public venues). This evidence suggests a more widespread practice throughout the country than we have assumed, begging the question: how did the Johnson women see themselves in Southern society? A book of verse by Anna that also contains Kate’s hand (Vol. 53 in the Johnson Family Papers, inside back cover) includes a reference to the “peasants” in the field – a phrase that reminds us that social class does not depend solely on race. The Johnsons undoubtedly identified with genteel society, like so many other families of relative means. A page from Frank Leslie’s Gazette that survives in the unbound files invites us to wonder how Anna interpreted its image.⁵⁷ With its genteel folks gathered around a piano while a young woman plays, this scene must have served as a model or reinforcement of proper social activities for Ann Johnson’s children. Moreover, the Johnsons were not the only people of color who owned music like this, who participated so regularly in social rituals that included music, and who used music as a marker of social status. They invite us to consider a broader representation of middle-class music-making across the nation.

But we must be careful to acknowledge what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes as the “singularity” of African American women’s cultural experiences, which varied across numerous dynamics.⁵⁸ Similarly, Gould observes that the women in the extended Johnson family crafted “discreet” identities to situate themselves within the South’s social strata, which placed white people on one side and Black on another. Whites saw themselves as free and further understood that Blacks could not occupy the same social space, yet free Black women defied this neat division.⁵⁹ Ann Battles Johnson worked diligently to ensure that her children had every advantage available within her economic means, and these prepared them to participate fully as members of the Black gentility along the lines of the more familiar example of Philadelphia. It may even have allowed for socializing across the color line, particularly before the Civil War dismantled their already tenuous position in Southern culture.

The Johnsons and their music collection provide enough evidence to disrupt the conventional narrative of American music. Their story challenges the binary that places the scientific music tradition solely in the purview of whites and admits only oral practices for everyone else. Both free and enslaved Black men and women performed scientific music, the exact repertory heard in spaces of cultural production created by whites in a strictly segregated society. Microhistories such as that of the Johnsons do more than broaden our understanding of nineteenth-century music; they necessitate a more nuanced approach that includes race, region, musical education (and talent), publishers and circulation trends, and social divisions. Indeed, the implications of this research reach beyond assumptions about music and demand acknowledgment of Black gentility, inviting methodologies such as materiality, ethnographic archival work, and cultural geography into new areas of study.

During the course of the Civil War, the Johnson’s family income dwindled as their enslaved laborers left. The farms no longer supported their lifestyle, and the supplemental income from the sewing that the women had always done barely met their needs. Their mother died in 1866, leaving their brother Byron (b. 1839) as head of the family until his death in 1872. Anna took over the family and remained in that position until her death, including being responsible for the eldest brother, William, who suffered from mental illness throughout his life. The Johnson family endured the same difficulties as post-war white middle-class families but, in the advent of what became the Jim Crow South, their prosperity could not be recovered in later decades.

Nevertheless, an undated photograph of Anna Johnson shows a well-dressed woman with a small dog. (Figure 10). It reflects several aspects of her life in general: calm, poised, socially correct, and culturally informed. Her visage embodies the ideals expressed in etiquette literature and evinces a surety portrayed by other Southern women of similar backgrounds, such as Amanda America Dickson of Georgia (admittedly the wealthiest Black woman in the nineteenth-century United States).⁶⁰ Indeed, every artifact that survives concerning Anna masks the hardships that she faced as a Black woman living through decades of white supremacist rule in Mississippi. More than any such article, her music collection testifies to identification with genteel culture, as understood by her extended family and social circle. In spite of the difficulties the Johnsons experienced in the later nineteenth century, Anna continued to collect music. The unbound music in this collection testifies to her affinity for new music throughout her life, even if she never had it gathered into discrete volumes.⁶¹ She subscribed to musical journals, purchased individual pieces, and kept it together throughout her life. Its existence demands recognition within musicological discourse as well as in broader historical analysis.

Figure 10. Photograph of Anna Johnson. Public domain, ancestry.com.

As an artifact, the Johnsons’ music collection constitutes the tip of an iceberg: if they participated in the act of music collection as a means to convey status, other Southern Blacks did as well. Anna and Katherine's bound volumes and the folders at LSU include music that belonged to their parents (a common practice), and its survival confirms the significance that William, Ann, and Anna (at least) attached to it. It expresses a double purpose in that it suggests a genuine interest in musicking as well as the process of accomplishment and performance in defining status. William and Ann intentionally instilled music education as a necessary attainment for their children because it confirmed their status as a genteel Black family, but this does not negate the possibility that Anna sincerely enjoyed musicking herself. Few women, regardless of their race, continued acquire music for as long as Anna did, unless they needed it for pedagogical purposes, and this fact suggests that William’s love of music passed to his daughter.

The existence of such a vast music collection demands that music be considered an integral part of any evaluation of cultural practices during this period. The particulars surrounding the Johnson music collection – how it signified class, social status, and Black gentility – attest to the family’s emphasis on music as certification of cultural position at a time when the ruling white majority precluded the possibility of such attainment. In this regard, the music collection stood in defiance of the racial divides that ruled the South as well as our subsequent reading of music in culture. Anna Johnson may not have been able to mingle with white women of equal economic status or attend performances of the music she appreciated, but she could sing or play it in her own home. As she grew older, she maintained this practice in the face of numerous obstacles placed in her path, purchasing new music and adding it to her collection. She continued the cultural performance of Black gentility as she defined it, resisting the oppressive standards of the Jim Crow South. In this, Anna Johnson deserves recognition alongside more famous Black women who strove against expectations set by whites. We must recognize not only the women who succeeded as public figures (such as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, Amelia Tilghman, or Eva Roosa) but also those whose quotidian activities – including music collection and performance – promoted Black gentility through musical accomplishment. In this, we must look to women such as Ann Battles and Anna Johnson, as well as a multitude of others whose musical education and whose use of music as a marker of culture contravene current views of who participated in parlor practice, how, and to what end.

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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.

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.