ABSTRACT
Murchinson pays attention to the intersections of music and fugitive slave narratives, using Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical story, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) as a case study, with a specific focus on gender. Decoding the lyrics of a popular lullaby, sung by Bessie Jones, as testimony of the separation of a slave mother and child, she traces the genealogy of the American slave narrative to this overlooked, yet foundational genre of black musical expression. Murchinson reads the slave narratives by Jacobs and Jones as specifically expressive and appreciative of the role of women in early black intellectual history. (keywords: music, lullaby, slave narrative, autobiography, African-American family, genealogy, orality, cultural memory, interdisciplinary, musicologist reading, Mississippi, Georgia, New Orleans, New York, 1861, 1960/70)
