The celebrated death song of the Cherokee Indians
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Date
1810
Authors
Hunter, Anne Home [composer]
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
[London] : G. Walker 106 Great Portland Street
Abstract
Description
"Few eighteenth-century songs on American Indian resistance subjects had the extended impact of "The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians". It was first published anonymously, ca. 1780 [also by Longman & Broderip, for the author, at the end of Hunter's Nine Canzonetts for two voices], but the text is by the Scottish-born poet Anne Home Hunter [wife of John Hunter, the surgeon], who later included it in her published collection of poems in 1802. It is not difficult to see why this song became so popular. The rhythms are snappy. The melody has logic, drive, and purpose. A feature that stands out in Hunter's version is the elegant bass line. It is so beautifully tailored that it's almost a singable melody in itself. By 1785 the song had already been published in the United States, and two years later it appeared in Royall Tyler's The Contrast, the first play by an American-born writer known to have been produced onstage. Musicologist John Koegel has found fifty-seven separate printed and manuscript sources of "The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians" in England and the United States dated between 1780 and 1855 (and suggests that there are likely more to be found) (Michael V. Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music, Yale UP, 2005, pp. 53, 57-9). Longman and Broderip were active under that trading name between 1776 and 1798; and as Longman, Lukey, and Co. 26, Harp and Crown, Cheapside c1767-1801."