Frederick Douglass Strengths

Developing Pride and Relationships Using the Strength of Music in Baldwin and Douglass Music has been used for thousands of years to illustrate and express emotions to others. It has a strong ability to connect people by using tempo, dynamics, rhythm, and other musical elements. Due to the mental, and sometimes physical pain that African Americans are surrounded with, music is often used to portray the feelings that they are unable to express through language. With the ability to express through music, relationships and understandings are formed. In The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass and Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin, African Americans within the texts are often unable to communicate their pain and sorrow

Douglass begins his description of slave songs by recounting the songs that were sang while slaves made the trip back and forth from the Great House Farm, “While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness” (Douglass 342). He depicts the large contrast of emotions that is contained within the songs. The illustration of the reverberation of the woods shows the strength of the sounds of the songs. He expands on the strength of music arguing that sometimes he believes that, “the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do” (Douglass 342). He acknowledges the power in the songs is much greater than the power within language. The emotions within the songs are unmatched by the literature that could be written on the struggles of the slaves. They bring out the true feelings of the slaves. The dynamics give listeners a sense of the true emotions within their songs. Without the ability to use different combinations of sounds, slaves would be unable to depict their feelings in a way that others would completely understand. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, speaks to the

The ability for slaves to sing together was a way in which slaves were able to come together emotionally in unison. Douglass discusses the way in which slaves would sing songs in unity, “This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves” (Douglass 342). Douglass relates to the fact that these songs were filled with meaning for the slaves themselves. While sometimes the people around them did not understand the suffering and pain within the songs, the slaves that were singing them were able to communicate with each other the mutual pain that each of them had. By communicating these pains through song, slaves were able to develop a pride within one another and were able to continue their fight for freedom. Sullivan also related to the ability for African Americans to develop unity through music to fight against their poor treatment, “Evoking a sense of unity among oppressed people is perhaps the most important way music was used by African-Americans to resist their abhorrent treatment and bolster the strength to continue fighting against those conditions” (Sullivan 24). Without a unity developed by music, African Americans would be unable psychologically to continue to fight for their rights. Music’s ability to bring African Americans