Scott Gac

Singing for Freedom, a book by Scott Gac

Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth Century Culture of Antebellum Reform details the story of this remarkable family of musicians from their rural Baptist beginnings through to their cosmopolitan success and the group’s uneven and untimely demise just before the Civil War. Their story is a nineteenth century one. Though the Hutchinsons were unique, they embodied a reform spirit—captured in their antislavery, temperance, and communitarian beliefs—deeply embedded in the New England experience of their day.

Attending a Hutchinson Family Singers’ concert differed from seeing shows presented by blackface minstrels, another celebrated entertainment of the era. In contrast to the racial overtones inherent whenever white performers took the stage impersonating black culture and black individuals, a ticket to a concert of the Hutchinson Family Singers provided entrance to the seemingly more gallant world of pre-Civil War reform. “You have sung the yokes from the necks and the fetters from the limbs of my race,” wrote Frederick Douglass to John Hutchinson.

The music of the Hutchinson Family Singers revolutionized an antislavery movement formerly shackled by biases against entertainment. Antislavery, once characterized by lectures and publications, changed suddenly in the early 1840s into a more multi-faceted reform endeavor—parades, picnics, concerts, and politics soon promoted an antislavery fervor that penetrated deeper into American life than ever before. The Hutchinsons stood at the forefront of this impulse. Even William Lloyd Garrison, the widely acknowledged leader of the American anti-slavery movement, thought “the intelligent and impartial historian can never forget the disinterested and powerful aid rendered by ‘the Hutchinson Family.’”

Singing for Freedom masterfully weaves together the lives of the four Hutchinson siblings while offering a new look at music and social reform in the nineteenth century by tracing the first family of American music and their experience as an important part of one of America’s most hallowed reform generations.

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