Earlier this year, I learned that the famous Black Spiritual “Nobody Knows” was printed in The Freedman and The Child at Home in April 1866.1 Both were monthly children’s periodicals published by the American Tract Society in Boston. They had a combined circulation of 224,000 copies per month, so a lot of kids could have learned about this song!2
The Freedman was created specifically for formerly enslaved black children that were just beginning to read. It contained short stories, moral lessons and a variety of educational content.
The Child at Home was a fairly standard Sunday school newspaper created for a predominately white audience. Many Christian denominations and evangelical organizations published such papers in the nineteenth century.
I recently acquired a bound volume of The Child at Home that contains every issue from 1865 to 1868. This is the color edition, which included colorful images on the front page of every issue. It is really beautiful, but that is not why I decided to acquire this; I am just interested in the song.
This might be the first time “Nobody Knows” appeared in print, though it’s very difficult to determine that with absolute certainty. Every source that I have seen indicates that this song was first published in the book Slave Songs of the United States in 1867. I can definitely say that it’s before that, which is exciting!
If you want to hear some of these songs, check out this performance by Tyler Mason-Draffen. “Nobody Knows” is the last song in the video.
If you still want to learn more, a PBS show called History Detectives also did a fantastic segment on Slave Songs of the United States several years ago. You can watch it online at this link: https://www.pbs.org/video/history-detectives-slave-songbook/
- A lot of this content was previously posted on my social media accounts earlier in 2023. ↩︎
- Several years of The Freedman is available for free online at this link: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uva.x000177178&seq=7 ↩︎
- This song book available online at this link, courtesy of the Smithsonian: https://archive.org/details/slavesongsofunit00alle ↩︎
Lost History Books 