Slavery's Passed Away and Other Songs

This collection of nineteenth-century songs reflects on emancipation, memory, and the changing lives of Black Americans after the Civil War. Its opening pieces move between solemn remembrance and jubilant celebration: an elder recalls the suffering of bondage, while newly freed voices look toward family, paid work, education, and a future shaped by freedom.

Other songs turn toward home and belonging, evoking pine forests, cotton fields, banjos, rivers, and the little cabin left behind. The singers are travelers, “contrabands,” laborers, and returning family members, carrying both grief for what has been lost and hope for what may be rebuilt. Written for popular performance and presented with choruses meant to be sung along with, these lyrics offer a vivid glimpse into the era’s musical storytelling, while their period dialect and racial language reflect the conventions of their time. Listeners will find a varied program of historical song—sometimes mournful, sometimes comic, and often communal in spirit.