How Does Frederick Douglass Present Music In The Souls Of Black Folk

Slaves faced struggle, despair, and torture while working on Southern plantations. Often these slaves would sing songs not to comfort themselves, but to express their disdain of reality. While online articles and videos offer a glimpse of the past, these songs will be analysed as they are presented in two books - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk - by Frederick Douglass, an ardent abolitionist, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, respectively. Although the aforementioned are both Black Americans, slave songs were conferred differently in their respective books; this is related to the author’s personal experience, intention, and living period.
For Frederick Douglass, the slave songs are a momento

In a chapter appropriately name “The Sorrow Song”, the songs listed are not only for the reader’s understanding, but to display “the articulate message of the slave” engraved within. When presenting the songs, however, Du Bois comments as an avid listener rather than a staunch performer.In this sense, the author’s interest is concentrated more on understanding the “signs of development” over the “centuries” as the history, the birthplace, and the diffusion of the slave songs are outlined by Du Bois. Du Bois also talks about how Americans “caricatured” the slave songs that “stirred the nation” through “straggling quartettes”, “‘minstrel’ songs” and “contemporary ‘coon’ songs”. Rather than expanding on roots of the “most beautiful expression of human experience”, Du Bois uses the songs as a platform to advance his argument of the chapter: the “good time America” that emphasizes “the probation of races” would be nothing without the soulful “Negro

It, however, echoes the principle in which Du Bois’s narrative is established on: the human soul “is a common factor” indifferent of one's “race, class, or religious affiliation”. Structuring “The Sorrow Song” without emotion is a vehicle for understanding the Black American plight for readers and writers who cannot relate. For the time The Souls of Black Folk was written, slave songs repeated by the Fisk Jubilee Singers were a result of America’s unnerving racial tensions even after the Civil War. This is not to say that Du Bois has no sympathy for the slaves; rather, it is his means of emphasizing that, in the future, “men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins”. Perhaps forming this opinion is easier for Du Bois because of his largely different