Songs of the Underground Railroad

Harriet Tubman; a significant American Abolitionist who saved many enslaved Africans from slavery through the Underground Railroad used songs such as “Go Down Moses," to indicate safety and “Wade in the Water” to signal escapees to get in the water to hide their scent. Some other songs were also used to signal various groups when she will return and when they should come out of hiding. Some of these songs also acted as a sign of hope and guidance toward freedom for those who she helped rescue. These songs helped as a sign of hope because it allowed enslaved Africans to take their minds off the fear of getting caught and to stay focused on running away towards freedom.

Songs of the Underground Railroad have continued to remain a powerful symbol of resilience, community, and covert resistance. These songs served as coded tools of communication that allowed enslaved people to share plans, warn others of danger, and maintain hope while avoiding detection by slaveholders. Movies like "12 Years a Slave" showed many African American spirituals like "Roll Jordan Roll" and other work songs in the movie which demonstrated how enslaved people used songs to communicate emotions like pain, hope and solidarity. Their dual function as expressions of faith and practical survival strategies highlight the creative ways music became a form of rebellion within enslaved communities. These songs blended biblical imagery with geographic or tactical instructions, allowing messages to be passed safely through spiritual language familiar to both enslaved people and overseers. The cultural legacy of these songs have influenced gospel, blues, and other genres within African American music and continue to appear in classrooms, museums and historical programs.

Songs

One reportedly coded Underground Railroad song is "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd". The song's title is said to refer to the star formation (an asterism) known in America as the Big Dipper and in Europe as The Plough. The pointer stars of the Big Dipper align with the North Star. In this song the repeated line "Follow the Drinkin' Gourd" is thus often interpreted as instructions to escaping slaves to travel north by following the North Star, leading them to the northern states, Canada, and freedom: The song ostensibly encodes escape instructions and a map from Mobile, Alabama, up the Tombigbee River, over the divide to the Tennessee River, then downriver to where the Tennessee and Ohio rivers meet in Paducah, Kentucky.

Another song with a reportedly secret meaning is "Now Let Me Fly" which references the biblical story of Ezekiel's Wheels. The song talks mostly of a promised land. This song might have boosted the morale and spirit of the slaves, giving them hope that there was a place waiting that was better than where they were.

"Go Down Moses", a spiritual that depicts the biblical story of Moses in Exodus leading his people to freedom, is believed by some to be a coded reference to the conductors on the Underground Railroad. The oppressor in the song is the pharaoh, but in real life would have been the slave owner.

Music is important in the religion of African Americans today, as it was in the telling of freedom.

Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave and abolitionist author. In his 19th-century autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), Douglass gives examples of how the songs sung by slaves had multiple meanings. His examples are sometimes quoted to support the claim of coded slave songs. Douglass similarly offers interesting comments but not clear evidence in My Bondage and Freedom: "A keen observer might have detected in our repeated singing of 'O Canaan, sweet Canaan, I am bound for the land of Canaan' something more than a hope of reaching heaven. We meant to reach the north – and the north was our Canaan. I thought I heard them say,/ There were lions in the way,/ I don't expect to stay/ Much longer here/ was a favorite air and had a double meaning. In the lips of some, it meant the expectation of a speedy summons to a world of spirits; but in the lips of our company, it simply meant a speedy pilgrimage toward a free state, and deliverance from all the evils and dangers of slavery."

Douglass's observations here likewise do not serve as clear evidence of the successful use of coded song lyrics to aid escaping slaves; he is writing here only of his small group of slaves who are encouraging each other as they finalize their plans to escape, not of widespread use of codes in song lyrics. At the beginning of this same paragraph, he writes that the slave owner may very well have seen through the simple code they were using: "I am the more inclined to think that he suspected us, because... we did many silly things, very well calculated to awaken suspicion." Douglass immediately goes on to discuss how their repeated singing of freedom was one of those "many silly things".