Boat Songs

Even more common than jubilee songs were songs sung by slaves working on the river, known more commonly as boat songs. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the rivers were the arteries of American commerce, dominating the transportation of goods across the nation. Like other forms of commerce, river transportation utilized slave labor to minimize cost and maximize profit. In this way slave labor helped sustain the profitability and growth of interstate commerce, and the sights and sounds of slaves were commonplace along American waterways.

Because slave labor became an integral part of this interstate commerce system, the slave boatmen were a common sight throughout the south. The songs they sang as they kept time on the oars sounded throughout the Mississippi Valley. In keeping with the ancestral tradition of singing different kinds of songs for specific occasions, they took on a distinctive tempo and melody. When one Maryland slaveholder took his boatmen to task for singing such "low-spirited" songs and told them to sing a tune he had heard while they hung tobacco on the farm, one slave replied that was a corn song, and that it would be difficult to slow down the tempo for rowing. Sung to a much more sonorous beat, the boat songs were spread throughout the south due to the fact that boatmen often traveled long distances.

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