Keeper1st | On Emancipation Day (1902) with lyrics (warning: period dialect/vocabulary) @Keeper1st | Uploaded June 2021 | Updated October 2024, 3 days ago.
This song from the groundbreaking all-black musical "In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy" describes the scene at an Emancipation Day parade of the time. In the late 19th century through to just after the beginning of the 20th, many places in the U.S. celebrated Emancipation Day (often in April to commemorate the first act of emancipation, but different dates in different places). I think, like the holding of cakewalks, the celebrations fell out of favor in most places as the prevailing opinion of the day became that you can never be totally free from slavery if you're constantly reminding yourself (and others) of it. Today obviously the prevailing opinion has shifted to one of a desire not to forget those who endured it.
There were two arrangements of this published in 1902. I used the one with more interesting harmonics. I put the vocal line an octave high, so apart from the piano solo arrangement I created after the first chorus, the way this plays is not playable by two hands. The arrangement I used is here:
loc.gov/item/ihas.100005224
the simpler arrangement is here:
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3493&context=mmb-vp
This song from the groundbreaking all-black musical "In Dahomey: A Negro Musical Comedy" describes the scene at an Emancipation Day parade of the time. In the late 19th century through to just after the beginning of the 20th, many places in the U.S. celebrated Emancipation Day (often in April to commemorate the first act of emancipation, but different dates in different places). I think, like the holding of cakewalks, the celebrations fell out of favor in most places as the prevailing opinion of the day became that you can never be totally free from slavery if you're constantly reminding yourself (and others) of it. Today obviously the prevailing opinion has shifted to one of a desire not to forget those who endured it.
There were two arrangements of this published in 1902. I used the one with more interesting harmonics. I put the vocal line an octave high, so apart from the piano solo arrangement I created after the first chorus, the way this plays is not playable by two hands. The arrangement I used is here:
loc.gov/item/ihas.100005224
the simpler arrangement is here:
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3493&context=mmb-vp
