Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform

From Journal of American History, March 2008

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform. By Scott Gac. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xiv, 312 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11198-9.)

Scott Gac's Singing for Freedom is a well-crafted study of one of the greatest musical acts in American history. The book provides a meticulous account of the rise and fall of the Hutchinson family singers, their role in antebellum reforms, and their creation of commercially viable protest music. The book would be a smashing success if it had accomplished only this, but it does so much more. It also provides a fresh look at the market revolution of the decades before the Civil War, sheds new light on the spread of the antislavery movement, and explains the emergence of a new and enduring form of protest.

Gac is a gifted narrator. The book transports the reader to the time and place of Hutchinson performances. His accounts of the family's early performances in Boston, Albany, and New York City are particularly vivid, providing a wonderful feel for the cultural vibrancy of the 1840s. Singing for Freedom beautifully captures the dynamic relationship between city and country, and the role of popular entertainment in an emerging consumer culture. Gac explains well the market space that the Hutchinson singers carved out: a space bounded on one side by morally suspect blackface minstrelsy and on the other by noncommercial church music. The key to holding this space was the simultaneously pious and provocative reform messages of the family's music. Going to hear the "Tribe of Jessie" was an exciting event that members of a religious middle class, uncomfortable with city entertainments, could genuinely justify as an act of moral reform.

Gac's book tells a paradoxical story of how the family's identification with the wildly controversial cause of immediate abolitionism was instrumental to the act's commercial success, and how the immense popularity of their music worked to bridge the divide between hostile antislavery factions. His careful chronicle of the Hutchinsons' rising star in the early 1840s illuminates how antislavery sentiments grew stronger in the North even as the organizational coherence of the abolitionist movement fell apart. Through it all, Gac reveals something very important about the ability of protest songs to resonate well beyond their social movement source. Singing for Freedom provides the beginning of a history of the invention of a new technology in American protest.

The career of Hutchinson family singers was not all triumphant. There were painful contradictions throughout. These temperance advocates came from a family farm that featured hops as its most profitable crop. They sang that they came from the mountains of the Granite State but did not actually visit the White Mountains until well after their initial success. They were staunch abolitionists but serenaded Henry Clay. All the members of the group struggled to balance commercial success with authenticity as reformers and performers. The disappointing end to the group's career mirrored the fate of the egalitarian dreams of the early immediate abolitionists.

This excellent book is a must read for historians of antebellum America, antislavery, temperance, and popular music. It should also be read by anyone interested in the relationship between music and social movements and the history of the American protest song.

Michael P. Young
University of Texas
Austin, Texas