In his 1808 history of the abolition of the slave trade, Thomas Clarkson celebrated three key pieces of abolitionist media that helped to ‘keep up a hatred of the trade’ in the face of repeated failures to pass an abolition bill in Parliament.²Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, vol. II (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), 188. He highlighted two pieces of visual media – the diagram of the slave ship, Brookes, and the Wedgwood antislavery medallion – as well as one song – William Cowper’s 1788 ballad, ‘The Negro’s Complaint.’ Like the ballads described in Oskar Cox Jensen’s post ‘The Same Old Tune’, Cowper’s ballad was a contrafactum: that is, he wrote a new abolitionist poem and indicated that it should be sung to a pre-existing tune. You can read Cowper’s poem and listen to ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost,’ the tune he selected, here.

The diagram, the medallion, and the ballad were disseminated widely in the period when abolitionism was most popular in Britain (1787 to 1807). Clarkson described the circulation of Cowper’s ballad in text and in song as follows:

From one it spread to another, till it travelled almost over the whole island. Falling at length into the hands of the musician, it was set to music; and then it found its way into the streets, both of the metropolis and of the country, where it was sung as a ballad; and where it gave a plain account of the subject, with an appropriate feeling, to those who heard it.⁴Clarkson, II: 190–91.

Clarkson’s reception history of ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ has been cited often in scholarship, and understandably so. He provides a rare contemporary account of musical abolitionism in the eighteenth century – a period before composers began printing explanatory prefaces to their antislavery songs. He was also a central figure in the anti-slave-trade movement, and one who, like the ballad he describes, travelled all across the UK in this period. Finally, his account seems to align perfectly with the picture that emerges from Cowper’s letters. In March 1788, a group of abolitionists asked the poet to produce a series of ballads that were intended to be sung on the streets. Among other ballads, Cowper produced ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ and indicated that it should be sung to the tune of ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’.

If we set aside Cowper’s intended tune for a moment and take a closer look at Clarkson’s account, however, we find that Clarkson actually leaves open the question of which tune was commonly associated with the poem of ‘The Negro’s Complaint’. Clarkson writes that the poem was set by ‘the musician’. Presumably, by this he means a professional musician or an amateur good enough to earn the name. But Cowper – a poet, not a musician – had selected the tune of ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’ from the outset. So when Clarkson wrote that ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ was sung as a ballad on the streets, did he really mean that it was sung to the tune of ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’, as Cowper had intended? Or that it was sung to a different tune, which had been selected or newly composed by a (professional) musician? Scholars have so far tended to assume the former, but my research points to the latter.

By my count (based on a search for notated musical scores that feature this poem), Clarkson could have been remembering one of seven different tunes associated with ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ in the years between 1787 and 1807. Though three of these were contrafacta, the story here is not so much about ‘The Same Old Tune’ as it is about ‘The Same Old Poem’, which was incorporated into diverse musical genres and performance contexts.

As a ballad, Cowper’s poem was sung to the tune of ‘Admiral Hosier’s Ghost’ and to a tune called ‘How Imperfect is Expression’. The latter was the tune James Porter selected when he included ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ in his 1795 Irish nationalist songster, Paddy’s Resource. Around the year 1790, the composer John Danby wrote a four-part glee setting of the poem. The glee would likely have been performed in catch and glee clubs – that is, singing societies where men got together to drink, socialise, and sing part-songs together.

Alternatively, Danby’s glee may have been performed in domestic gatherings of mixed company. Two other composers, Edward Miller and George Guest, wrote settings of ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ for voice and small orchestral ensemble in 1789 and c.1794, respectively. These multi-movement cantata settings were best suited to the concert stage.

Finally, Cowper’s poem was used in piano-vocal scores composed by a Miss Greenwood in 1793, by R.J.S. Stevens c.1798, and by John Wall Callcott c.1797. These composers’ scores were ideally suited to informal performance in the home by female amateur musicians. In my dissertation and recent article, I examine this culture of women’s musical abolitionism and show that such scores were collected by British women in the period.

Cowper’s poem had staying power beyond the anti-slave-trade movement, too. I’ve located another glee setting that was composed by Joseph Mazzinghi around 1811–15, several years after the 1807 abolition of the slave trade. I’ve also found a three-part choral setting by the American abolitionist George W. Clark from 1845.

All told, this makes nine musical settings of ‘The Negro’s Complaint’: nine different people, that is, who created new antislavery songs to this ‘same old poem’. And these nine are just the tip of the iceberg: there must have been countless others who sang or listened to these songs on the streets, at the family pianoforte, at the professional concert, or in the glee club.

To be sure, the number of musical settings I have found of this single poem is unusually high: other abolitionist poems were set to music and printed in notated musical scores anywhere between one and four times. Nevertheless, the musical reception history of ‘The Negro’s Complaint’ illustrates in a nutshell the importance of incorporating notated musical scores into our research on political songs of the eighteenth century.

At the most basic level, the scores show that Cowper’s poem was even more popular than we originally thought. But they also uncover the political work of little-known eighteenth-century song composers whose involvement in abolitionism has largely gone unnoticed, despite being referenced in Clarkson’s well-known history of abolition. Their musical scores greatly expand our knowledge of who was involved in anti-slave-trade debates, where these debates took place, and how they were articulated in music.