Darling Nelly Gray: A Song History

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Benjamin Hanby (1833–1867) grew up in an Ohio family active in the Underground Railroad; his father, William Hanby, helped run the station at Westerville.[1] The song traces back to Joseph Selby, a freedom seeker bound for Canada who died at the family's Rushville home in 1842, still hoping to earn enough to buy the freedom of the woman he meant to marry.[1][2] Years later, as an Otterbein student, Hanby saw a slave auction in Kentucky, an experience that pushed him to finish the piece.[2] Oliver Ditson & Co. issued it in 1856 as his first published song.[2][3] Its subject is a man who has fled slavery and mourns the woman he loves, whom he could not free and who is still held in bondage.[3][4]

1863 photograph of a brick building in Alexandria, Virginia, once used as a pen by slave traders, with Union soldiers outside

Andrew Joseph Russell, Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia, photograph, 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Hanby wrote it for the minstrel stage, where professionals in blackface and costume performed in ways that mocked African Americans, and it was also sold as sheet music for amateurs to sing at home.[5] Its aim, though, was almost surely to move white Northerners toward sympathy with enslaved people and support for abolition.[5] Preachers took it up in antislavery sermons, abolitionists dubbed it "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of song," and Union soldiers later sang it in camp.[2] Hanby went on to be ordained, ran a singing school, wrote the Christmas favorite Up on the Housetop, and had produced more than eighty songs when tuberculosis killed him in 1867.[1][2]

The melody outlived the abolition era. In 1937 Louis Armstrong and the Mills Brothers recorded it together for Decca on a 78 rpm disc.[6]

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Sources

  1. Ohio Memory (Ohio History Connection): "Benjamin Hanby: A Life in Music".
  2. Historical Marker Database: "Darling Nelly Gray Historical Marker".
  3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History: "Darling Nelly Gray" (1856 sheet music).
  4. Britannica: "Benjamin Hanby".
  5. University of Pittsburgh, Voices Across Time: "Darling Nelly Gray".
  6. Internet Archive (Great 78 Project): "Darling Nelly Gray" by the Mills Brothers and Louis Armstrong.