Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp , Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song

Abstract

In “Sounds of Sympathy,” I contextualize William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp (1848) within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American hymnodic reforms, the ecstatic singing of the Second Great Awakening, minstrelsy, the rise of the Hutchinson Family Singers, and the culture of antislavery song more generally. Ultimately, I argue that Brown’s songbook—which included two of his own compositions—was Brown’s effort to harness sound as a tool to aid abolition.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 37 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.