Ananias Davisson, Shape Note Composer and Enslaver

My American roots trio has been practicing “Idumea,” one of my favorite shape note songs. “Shape note” signifies a type of shape-based musical notation popular in the early 1800s; shape note hymns reveal much about people’s beliefs concerning religion, mortality, and an afterlife during that era.

The spare, minor-mode harmony in “Idumea” sends shivers up and down my spine. The music was composed by Ananias Davisson, a Virginian. Initially Davisson printed it with poetry by the English cleric Isaac Watts (1674-1748) in his 1816 tune book Kentucky Harmony. Almost twenty years later, William Walker included “Idumea” in his 1835 Southern Harmony, pairing Davisson’s music with different lyrics that begin: “And am I born to die? To lay this body down? And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown?” These portentous words are by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), another English preacher and a leader in the Methodist religious movement.

When I saw “1816” and “Kentucky” on our sheet music, I figured Ananias Davisson was probably a white Southerner wealthy enough to have had time to compose music and publish a book of Christian hymns. And I wondered: Did he enslave his fellow human beings?

Slavery has been much on my mind over the last several years as I did the research for the third Gideon Stoltz mystery, Lay This Body Down. Set in 1837, the story introduces a young boy fleeing from a Virginia plantation who arrives in my fictional town of Adamant. In addition to a murder, it includes the kidnapping of free African Americans to be sold into slavery – crimes that my main character, Sheriff Gideon Stoltz, must risk his life to prevent.

Using the internet, it didn’t take me long to learn about Ananias Davisson.

Born in 1780, Davisson lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He owned a printing shop in Harrisonburg, where he produced copies of Kentucky Harmony. He was also a farmer, a land speculator, a “ruling elder” in the Presbyterian Church, and a shape note singing instructor. He traveled to Tennessee and Kentucky, where he sold copies of his tune book and cultivated contacts among other teachers of singing. They shared their compositions with Davisson, which he assembled, along with his own hymns and older traditional ones, in subsequent editions of Kentucky Harmony.

The book sold well, especially on the Southern frontier. Between 1816 and 1826, Davisson brought out five editions of the 160-page work. Later versions have fewer hymns with Northern origins and more songs influenced by Southern folk melodies. Irving Lowens, a musicologist with the Library of Congress, judged Kentucky Harmony “one of the most important and influential American hymnodies ever compiled.”

With his printing press (and I’m speculating here), Davisson also might have printed notices about people fleeing from slavery. Such bills, mailed to sheriffs and constables and reviewed by bounty hunters, described fugitives in detail, including the clothes they were wearing when they “eloped” or “absconded,” their height and build, facial features, mannerisms, skills, and any scars or wounds they bore. Bills announced rewards of up to $200 for the apprehension and return of these people into bondage, where they might be punished brutally and where they could expect to remain enslaved for the rest of their lives unless they fled again.

Davisson would have read newspaper advertisements for fugitives, thousands of which appeared in papers throughout the South and in border states in the North. Here’s an excerpt from one in the Staunton Spectator in 1838, a paper near where Davisson lived: “Ranaway, a negro named David – with some iron hobbles around each ankle.” (The emphasis is in the original.)

And this one, also 1838, from Lumberton, North Carolina: “Committed [to jail] a mulatto fellow – his back shows lasting impressions of the whip, and leaves no doubt of his being A SLAVE.”

An online Dictionary of Virginia Biography by the state Library of Virginia notes that in 1850, when Davisson was farming in southeastern Rockingham County, “he paid taxes on 572 acres, and his real estate was valued at $10,265,” equaling around $390,000 today. His wealth didn’t consist solely of land. “In 1850 the census taker enumerated fourteen slaves in his household, eight of whom were ten years of age or older.”

Davisson died on October 21, 1857, at age 77, and was buried in his church’s graveyard south of Harrisonburg. By then, his wife, Ann, had died; the couple had no children who lived to adulthood. According to the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “To fulfill an ‘intention long entertained,’ he manumitted his slaves in his will ‘in consideration of their services.’ Those who had reached the age of eighteen were to be liberated immediately, while the children were to remain enslaved until they came of age. To a former servant named Ned, Davisson bequeathed a tract of land containing about forty acres.”

“And am I born to die? To lay this body down? And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown?”

As his life drew to an end, was Ananias Davisson at peace with the things he had done? Did he tremble with shame or guilt at the institution of slavery, on which his prosperity and wealth had been built? Did he believe that freeing the people he’d enslaved had balanced the books and paid them back for their servitude?

I wish I knew the answers to those questions.

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Click HERE to listen to a stirring rendition of “Idumea” from the movie Cold Mountain.

For more information, see Ananias Davisson (1780–1857), by Jennifer R. Loux, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia.

(Thanks to my friend and singing partner Suzanne Rhodes for her insights and input into this essay.)