Graduate Students

Summary Statement of Research Interests

• In the decade preceding the American Revolution, political songs increasingly appeared in print media of British Colonial America, expressing a variety of viewpoints about the growing tension between the British government and its American colonies, rooted in two centuries of radical political ideology, and concurrent with serious philosophical debate about the affective qualities and proper societal role of music and – specific to this study – song. This project, entitled “‘Fit to be sung in Streets:’ the mobilizing power of political song in pre-revolutionary British Colonial America, 1750-1776,” explores the genesis of prerevolutionary political song; the role of song in mobilizing Patriot and Loyalist sentiment; and what songs and their use tell us about that mobilization that is different from what is revealed by other sources (such as pamphlet literature and government documents), and then connecting that evidence to existing scholarship on precipitants to the revolution, notably print culture and insurgency. The project also explains the degree to which these songs built upon British Atlantic practices honed over preceding centuries, wherein familiar tunes were appropriated both for their specific associations with past social and political causes as well as certain “affective” musicological properties that tended to evoke a particular emotional response in the auditor. Statistical data drawn from both the songs themselves (lyrics and tunes) as well as how they were used in print media, supported by manuscript sources that provide first-hand testimony of the effect of sound in general, and song and singing where noted, on contemporaries’ emotions, hopes and fears, suggests development of a political functionality of song specific to the British American experience. This expression was documented (and, in some cases, fostered) by British American printers and publishers and their contributors and sponsors, especially in newspapers but also in broadsides, magazines, pamphlets and books, whose messages, creators, and audiences overlap. The data suggest that the purveyors of print culture (and the social and political interests they represented) may have intended a specific role for song in the informing and opinion-forming process, explicitly calling on the population to mobilize around the difficult decision to renounce British allegiance and go to war. Moreover, evidence of reception of these songs as revealed in manuscript diaries, letters, and journals, as well as in newspapers coverage of events (or subsequent reaction to them), demonstrates where song had a mobilizing effect, what John Adams famously described as the ability of political songs – and specifically the singing of them – to “cultivat(e) the Sensations of Freedom,” using songs specifically identified, as in one famous example, as “Fit to be sung in Streets.”