The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech.

The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech. By Shane White and Graham White. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005). Pp. xxii, 241. Paper, $17.00, ISBN 0-8070-5027-X; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-8070-5026-1.)

The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech is a lively book, full of echoes. In it, Shane White and Graham White deftly catalogue some of slavery's sounds, mostly musical and linguistic, from the mid-eighteenth century to the immediate post-bellum period. The principal arguments of the book are: the sounds of African American culture were distinctive; sounds "whose roots lay deep in the slaves' African homelands, collided with European musical and speech forms, to create something new" (p. xviii); the sounds of black culture held a shock value for whites in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, the continued strangeness--"weirdness" is the Whites' recurring term--of these sounds alienated whites from black culture; African American culture understood music "as functional, as part and parcel of the ordinary course of daily life, rather than as something abstracted from it" (p. 40); black music (and certain types of speech) was nonlinear and mixed; what whites heard as irregular and jarring (noise?), blacks heard as meaningful, vibrant, and rhythmic (sound?); and the putatively uniform sound of black speechways was increasingly parodied by whites in their ongoing construction of racial otherness.

The study's heavy emphasis on the spoken word--as the book's subtitle says, "songs, sermons, and speech"--as the principal form of sound echoes an older, distinguished historiography most often associated with the work of Lawrence W. Levine and Roger D. Abrahams, among others. The book does not engage more recent work on historical aurality, a reading of which would have helped temper some of the authors' more extravagant claims. For example, the Whites argue that there is a "silence in the [eighteenth-century] sources about slave noise" and "slave music" (p. 151). Detailed work by Richard Cullen Rath (How Early, America Sounded [Ithaca, N.Y, 2003]) and by Peter Charles Hoffer (Sensory Worlds in Early America [Baltimore, 2003]), suggests this is not the case. Read against Rath and Hoffer, the authors' claim that urban blacks in the late antebellum period "seemed to contemporaries to have become more noticeable and more discordant" appears clumsy (p. 152). Similarly, Leigh Eric Schmidt's formidable book Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2000) presents compelling evidence that elite ears--black, white, southern, and northern--heard the evangelical religious fervor of poor whites and black slaves in remarkably similar ways, evidence that complicates the Whites' too-tidy claims regarding distinctly and authentically African and European acoustemologies.

The book is accompanied by a superb compact disc with eighteenth tracks of field calls, prayers, spirituals, and sermons that were recorded and collected by folklorists John A. Lomax and Ruby T. Lomax in the 1930s. The Whites use them in an effort "to illustrate more clearly the nature and meaning of African American sounds" (p. xxi). There are problems with this approach, of course: recordings from the 1930s cannot reproduce the sounds of slavery (the Whites claim they "bring us about as close as we are ever going to get to hearing" the sounds of slavery [p. xxii]), and our listening, no matter how earnest, can hardly interpret the sounds with the same meaning as, say, the ears of the antebellum slaveholder or northern abolitionist. The Whites seem conflicted on this important matter. While they acknowledge that we "cannot really recover the sounds" of slavery, they nevertheless invite us in their text to listen to particular tracks in an "effort to hear something similar" recorded in the 1930s (pp. 28, 21). We cannot listen to the sounds of slavery not just because they were never recorded but because the context in which the sounds were produced and the context in which we consume them has changed so radically. In this respect, the Lomax recordings demand a much fuller discussion than the Whites offer. Jonathan Sterne's sophisticated questioning of "the ideology of transparency suggested by ethnographic recordists" in his study, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C., 2003, p. 319), would have been a good place to start. Nevertheless, to this reviewer's ears, the recordings in and of themselves are, as the Whites probably intended, the highlight of the work.

On the whole, The Sounds of Slavery is an intriguing book, a study executed elegantly and thoughtfully. But the inattention to a growing and sophisticated literature on auditory culture and historical acoustemology gives the study a tired feel (sound?). Over a decade ago, Douglas Kahn warned against the continued "privileging of music as the art of sound in modern Western culture" (Douglas Kahn, "Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed," in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde [Cambridge, Mass., 1992], 3), but it is a caution largely ignored by the Whites. As a result, even the most compelling part of this book--the CD--contains (unwitting?) conceits. After all, slavery's soundscape was constituted as much by its silences, its quiet moments, stealthy rustles, whispers beyond the masters' ears, and the deliberately quiet aspects of slave religion. For the Whites, though, the barely audible is less reliable for understanding African American culture. As they put it, "slave culture was made to be heard" (p. ix). But it was not, at least not always; and the aural contours of slave culture were far more varied, subtle, and textured than the term "sounds of slavery" can allow for.

In a way, the Whites' privileging of slavery's audibility is a product of the book's format and presentation. The CD is simply full of sound because, quite simply, it has to be. Who, besides John Cage aficionados, would buy a CD with tracks of indistinguishable rustles and unpalatable silences? Some sounds, it seems, are more important--and consumable--than others.

MARK M. SMITH

University of South Carolina