published in The Emancipation Car
by Joshua McCarter Simpson
tune: “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground”,1852

In 2022 a new resource became available to students of American musical history. Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, a collection of some of the earliest published songs from the Black American experience was compiled and published by Mat Callahan and the University Press of Mississippi. In this collection we found the work of Joshua McCarter Simpson and his Emancipation Car. Simpson’s boldly honest preface (“A Note to the Public”) and his searing texts were among the earliest findings that felt essential for us as performers. “To The White People of America” holds a powerful balance of ideas: calling out the hypocrisy of white enslavers, questioning if anyone can actually hear his people’s suffering, and a remarkable refrain: “the day will come that you must die.” Is this a condemnation, is it speaking a truth that we are all equal under the force of mortality? Or is he referring to the death of an ideology? Simpson carefully chose the tune to set this text to: Stephen Foster’s “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground,” a song often sung in minstrel shows portraying an enslaved person as lamenting the death of his enslaver.