Songs of the Underground Railroad werespiritual and work songs used during the early-to-mid 19th century in theUnited States to encourage and convey coded information to escapingslaves as they moved along the variousUnderground Railroad routes. As it was illegal in mostslave states to teach slaves to read or write, songs were used to communicate messages and directions about when, where, and how to escape, and warned of dangers and obstacles along the route.
Harriet Tubman; a significant American Abolitionist who saved many enslaved Africans from slavery through theUnderground Railroad used songs such as “Go Down Moses," to indicate safety and “Wade in the Water” to signal escapees to get in the water to hide their scent. Some other songs were also used signal varies groups when she will return and when they should come out of hiding. Some of these songs also acted as a sign of hope and guidance toward freedom for those who she helped rescue. These songs helped as a sign of hope because it allowed enslaved Africans to take their minds off the fear of getting caught and to stay focused on running away towards freedom.
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One reportedly coded Underground Railroad song is "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd".[1] The song's title is said to refer to the star formation (anasterism) known in America as theBig Dipper and in Europe as The Plough. The pointer stars of the Big Dipper align with theNorth Star. In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus often interpreted as instructions to escaping slaves to travel north by following the North Star, leading them to the northern states, Canada, and freedom: The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a map from Mobile, Alabama, up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to the Tennessee River, then downriver to where the Tennessee and Ohio rivers meet in Paducah, Kentucky.[2]
Another song with a reportedly secret meaning is "Now Let Me Fly"[3] which references the biblical story of Ezekiel's Wheels.[4] The song talks mostly of a promised land. This song might have boosted the morale and spirit of the slaves, giving them hope that there was a place waiting that was better than where they were.
"Go Down Moses", aspiritual that depicts the biblical story ofMoses inExodus leading his people to freedom, is believed by some to be a coded reference to the conductors on theUnderground Railroad. The oppressor in the song is thepharaoh, but in real life would have been the slave owner.
Music is important in the religion ofAfrican Americans today, as it was in the telling of freedom.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave and abolitionist author. In his 19th-century autobiography,Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass gives examples of how the songs sung by slaves had multiple meanings. His examples are sometimes quoted to support the claim of coded slave songs. Douglass similarly offers interesting comments but not clear evidence inMy Bondage and Freedom: "A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan' something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north – and the north was our Canaan.I thought I heard them say,/ There were lions in the way,/ I don't expect to stay/ Much longer here/ was a favorite air and had a double meaning. In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery."
Douglass's observations here likewise do not serve as clear evidence of the successful use of coded song lyrics to aid escaping slaves; he is writing here only of his small group of slaves who are encouraging each other as they finalize their plans to escape, not of widespread use of codes in song lyrics. At the beginning of this same paragraph, he writes that the slave owner may very well have seen through the simple code they were using: "I am the more inclined to think that he suspected us, because... we did many silly things, very well calculated to awaken suspicion." Douglass immediately goes on to discuss how their repeated singing of freedom was one of those "many silly things".
While many believe that the stories told about the songs of the Underground Railroad are true, there are also many skeptics. Some claim that songs of the Underground Railroad is anurban legend dating from the later 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
Skeptics claim that the legend has been picked up by credulous authors and published as fact without historical documentation. Some authors who believe the song held instructions for escaping slavery admit the ephemeral nature of oral history, often using such phrases as "supposed", "according to folklorists", and "gospelologists cite", to preface their statements.
Many popular sources claim that spirituals and other songs, such as "Steal Away" or "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd", contained coded information and helped individuals navigate the railroad, but these sources offer little traditional archival evidence to support their claims. Some scholars who have examined these claims tend to believe that while the slave songs may certainly have expressed hope for deliverance from the sorrows of this world, these songs did not present literal help for runaway slaves.[12][13]
There is evidence, however, that the Underground Railroad conductorHarriet Tubman used at least two songs. Sarah Bradford's biography of Tubman,Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, published in 1869, quotes Tubman as saying that she used "Go Down Moses" as one of two code songs to communicate with fugitive enslaved people escaping from Maryland.[14]
The theory perhaps developed from the expansion of a folktale[15][16] found inJohn A. Lomax's 1934 bookAmerican Ballads & Folk Songs. In his preface to "Foller de Drinkin' Gou'd", page 227 in his section on reels, he quotes a story from H.B Parks: "One of my great-uncles, who was connected with the railroad movement, remembered that in the records of the Anti-Slavery Society there was a story of a peg-leg sailor, known asPeg-Leg Joe, who made a number of trips through the South and induced young Negroes to run away and escape... The main scene of his activities was in the country north of Mobile, and the trail described in the song followed northward to the headwaters of the Tombigbee River, thence over the divide and down the Ohio River to Ohio... the peg-leg sailor would... teach this song to the young slaves and show them the mark of his natural left foot and the round hole made by his peg-leg. He would then go ahead of them northward and leave a print made of charcoal and mud of the outline of a human left foot and a round spot in place of the right foot... Nothing more could be found relative to the man... 'Drinkin' gou'd' is the Great Dipper... 'The grea' big un' the Ohio.[17][18]
