URL's Latrobe sketch http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel07.html http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/vc006753.jpg Roundtable http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-04/slavery/white.shtml http://www.common-place.org/vol-01/no-04/slavery/white.shtml eBook - related topic http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12101/12101-h/12101-h/12101-h.htm Egerton, Douglas R. "The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (review)" Journal of the Early Republic - Volume 26, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 511-513 University of Pennsylvania Press Excerpt Journal of the Early Republic 26.3 (2006) 511-513 [Access article in PDF] Early one spring evening in 1819, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, then conducting a tour of the southern states, stumbled upon several hundred African Americans parading toward a New Orleans cemetery. Intrigued, the French visitor followed. The deceased was an aged Congo-born woman, and so Latrobe was not surprised to hear a "great croud of women" singing and praying loudly. But he was startled when the woman's grandsons and great-grandsons stepped forward to hurl bones and even skulls at the modest casket, the curious instruments sounding "a loud report on the hollow Coffin" (162). What Latrobe was hearing, historians Shane White and Graham White understand, was the sound of the deceased being cut loose from her troubled life and literally drummed into the next world. Despite the fact that we live in a world of aural overload, historians have been surprisingly slow to investigate the intriguing question of the everyday sounds of early national America. Folklorists like Roger Abrahams have long described the importance of black hymns and the rhythmic songs enslaved workers...