The Auction Block and the Hit Song: Blues Is My Business

Written By: Amy Abugo Ongiri

Slavery continues to be an uncomfortable topic for most Americans. This is doubly so for Americans of African descent because of its association with our collective trauma, pain, and sorrow. In many ways, though, the story of our enslavement is one of radical hope. It is awe inspiring to consider the fact that even though all the technologies of European modernity and industrialization were allied in the attempt to control, oppress, and even eliminate us, and we are still here and very much free. What kept us here and moving towards freedom was our indigenous knowledge. Our agrarian roots didn’t start with our enslavement. Many enslaved people were expert planters and cultivators in Africa, and that knowledge was at least part of the reason that we were stolen away by Europeans in the first place, because they valued our ability to cultivate rice and other plants that would become mainstays in the US.

The seeds we planted under that bitter experience flourished despite the pain that we also experienced under enslavement. Music and sound became our means of resistance, and the seeds that we planted culturally flourished as well, despite the horrible conditions under which they came to expression.  It is commonly known that the roots of all US popular music originate in African American expressive culture. But do we always know how deep and widely those roots go?

One of the most impactful popular protest songs of all time has its roots in the 19th-century expression of slaves who sought freedom and liberation under what Amiri Baraka called “the worst kind of slavery.” Baraka wrote the book Blues People, a landmark study of the impact of enslavement on the development of African American culture. For him, the blues were the deepest experience of cultural expression created as people turned from Africans during enslavement into African Americans. Baraka would write: “Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”  

Sometime in the late 1800s, possibly earlier, enslaved African Americans composed a song expressing their desire for liberation. The song was called “No More Auction Block for Me,” and it is a carefully detailed account of all of the things that enslaved people will joyfully leave behind when they achieve freedom. The song focuses on both the everyday aspects of slavery, such as the insufficient food rations, as the song exclaims, “no more pinch of salt for me, no more peck of corn for me.” While the rest of the song celebrates the end of the harsh realities of slavery, “no more hundred lash for me, no more mistress call for me.” An early publication of the song that appeared in 1867 said it was a song “to which the Rebellion had actually given rise.” Exactly which rebellion is somewhat in question, as very few people were concerned about recording the facts of Black resistance in the 1800s.

Image credit the Smithsonian

When it was written down in 1867, the author claims that “it was first sung” when enslaved people were sent to build fortifications for the confederate army on the Gullah Islands of Hilton Head and Bay Point. It is likely that enslaved people sang the song before this moment, but this was the first time that their enslavers heard it and recorded it. From a contemporary standpoint, it seems unlikely that enslaved people sang the song in support of the confederacy as its earliest recorders implied. Enslaved labor formed the cornerstone of the confederate rebellion, and the confederacy was fighting to maintain it. The alternate title for the song “Many Thousands Gone” suggests that the song was either a lament for the losses under slavery or a celebration of those who had managed to escape it by running away.

Canadians have long celebrated the song as part of the heritage of the “Black Loyalists” of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Black Loyalists were enslaved and free people of African descent who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. In 1775, a British proclamation promised land, freedom, and protection to any person of African descent who fought for the British. When it was clear that the British would not win, thousands of these soldiers and their families fled across the border to Canada, forming some of the first free settlements there in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These soldiers faced discrimination and denial of benefits that they were promised, though many persevered and were foundational to Canadian society. At least a thousand of these Black Loyalists elected to leave Canada and return to Africa in 1792. They settled in Sierra Leone and created the city of Freetown, which is now the capital and largest city in that country.

Whether the song is the product of the civil war or the revolutionary war, the song’s impact continues to be deeply felt, though, like the history of enslaved people, it’s not always acknowledged. The singer Odetta began performing the song in the 1950s and recorded it on her 1960 album Live at Carnegie Hall. Known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” Odetta explored the history of African American culture in song. When she began singing “No More Auction Block for Me” at folk music venues around New York City, she was heard by a young Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, himself, would begin performing the song, undoubtedly influenced by sharing the stage with Odetta in many of those same venues.

Dylan was already deeply influenced by Odetta’s music, and, in fact, he claimed it was Odetta who made him a folk singer in the first place. Dylan had become Dylan by practicing to an Odetta album when he was still a teenager in Minnesota. It was, according to him, the first folk album that he ever owned, and he learned every song on it. It was the music of Odetta that convinced Dylan to give up the electric guitar that he had been playing as a teenager and turn to folk music in the first place. He even bought the same model of acoustic guitar as Odetta, saying: “Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.” In 1965, Odetta would turn the tables on Dylan by recording Odetta Sings Dylan.

Odetta in 1961

Bob Dylan released the anti-war song “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963, and it would go on to become one of the best-selling and most iconic protest songs in US history. Since its release, the song has been recorded hundreds of times by a wide variety of artists. When the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary released their version of the song (also in 1963), it sold 300,000 copies in its first week and quickly exceeded a million sales. Since the song was copyrighted to Bob Dylan when he wrote the lyrics in the 1960s, he has continued to profit tremendously from its recording. In 2019, the song was even used in a Budweiser advertisement that aired during the Super Bowl.

It wasn’t until 1978 that Bob Dylan would acknowledge that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a direct adaptation from “No More Auction Block for Me.”

The song literally made him millions, but he didn’t owe anything to the song’s original creators. Dylan has a long history of litigation around his “borrowing” of elements of songs from other musicians, but when “No More Auction Block for Me” was first written down in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States, its creation was simply attributed to “Anonymous.” One could argue that it would have been impossible for Dylan to compensate African Americans for their creative work because of the conditions of the work’s creation that were beyond his control. But that wouldn’t explain why it took so long for him to acknowledge the song’s origins.

The creation of US popular music has always been a profoundly material as well as aesthetic process. In Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, Matthew D. Morrison marks the way that music as the space of Black creative possibility also became the space in which American commercial music was created as well. This space was not only one of creative productivity but also, as many scholars have noted, one that replicated the wider theft and exploitation occurring in mainstream US culture. Morrison notes: “Blacksound is the locus through which the original performances (sonic and corporeal aesthetics) of black musicians—who develop their practices both within their own segregated communities and in relation to European American and other ethnic styles over time—were then taken up as sources of property to be owned and copyrighted by mostly white musicians in the establishment of the popular music industry.”

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like for the originators of “No More Auction Block for Me” to sit and imagine freedom when it barely seemed like a possibility. It was a leap of radical hope and undoubtedly a very sacred moment. The journey of the song from a lament and call for liberation by enslaved African Americans to its hidden uses and commercial success for non-Black people is emblematic of the ways in which Black music exists within American culture in general. African Americans have always provided commercial music’s roots and also its branches but have rarely been fully acknowledged for that work. Our lyrical cries for freedom have nourished us when freedom didn’t even seem possible. We and all other Americans have always received the benefits of that imaginative leap even when it hasn’t been acknowledged or compensated. The musical continuity from slavery to the present moments assure that our sacred moments will never be lost to us.

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