Overview

Includes 22 new settings of period tunes, and examines the expressive culture of the largest antebellum tenant farmer protest from its origin to its 21st-century reverberations. Upstate New York's Anti-Rent Movement is considered the last struggle over feudalism in the United States. Tenant farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk region engaged in organized protest throughout the 1840s to contest monopoly ownership of the land they worked. Arguing their cause in newspapers, on broadsides, and at rallies, their aspirations also took shape in poetry and song. More than twenty sets of lyrics (and one instrumental composition) were written at various stages of the conflict. Some of their musical sources, such as ""Old Dan Tucker"" and ""Bruce's Address,"" are still well known. Each fully contextualized song offers insight into the role vernacular music played in one of the nineteenth century's major social reform movements. This is the first book to gather the poetry and corresponding tunes into one publication. It provides detailed analysis of the repertory, followed by new musical scores of the songs, reconstructed from contemporary historical sources for study and performance. It also examines the movement's later dramatization in novels, film, and public commemorations as successive generations grapple with its meaning.

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9798855800715

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Reviews

""This is a wonderful work. Newman has distilled from a big secondary literature a clear, accurate, and remarkably economical account of the Anti-Rent Movement in nineteenth-century New York.... Newman's work enables us to feel what the anti-rent faithful felt during the long struggle with their manor lords. There is nothing like Songs and Sounds in the literature. It's the best short history of the Anti-Rent Movement. It's the best analysis of popular culture in the Anti-Rent era."" — Charles W. McCurdy, Professor of History and Law, Emeritus, University of Virginia ""A model for others to emulate."" — Richard Hamm, author of Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920.

Author Information

Nancy Newman is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America.

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