Religious music served a political function in the southern United States during the antebellum period. This article examines catechisms and hymnbooks used by white evangelical missionaries and slaveowners in the antebellum South, arguing that the planter elite deployed hymns as a medium to assert white supremacy. The term sonic domination identifies processes whereby sound functioned as a social tool to maintain discipline and order among the enslaved population. Black and white people sang hymns in church, at interracial revivals, and during civic services; they were also heard on bells and cited in poetry. English texts and tunes included in slave catechisms and white portrayals of Black singing highlight the role of evangelical hymns in maintaining plantation order in the Old South. At the same time, enslaved Black Christians found creative ways to circumvent the oppressive power of the white elite through song. African Americans employed English hymns in their own religious rituals and used them to convey hidden meanings on the plantation. Both genres, which interacted and ultimately influenced each other, contributed to an eventual codification of American evangelical hymnody.

The infrastructure of American song contains many specters faded from public consciousness yet still present as moisture in walls. The screams of Aunt Hester, dancing of Jim Crow, silence of Venus . . . the unattainable and highly illuminating animated properties belonging once to the voices of enslaved African Americans. All these and more haunt American music, their dampened legacies intertwined with the weighted domina­tion of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. At the same time, these spec­ters emphasize Black musical autonomy and how music shapes longstand­ing cultural identities, real or imagined. Analyzing sources as a form of historicized social practice shifts the very foundation on which African American music scholarship rests. The Rodney ghosts are disparate and fleeting, shifting our gaze across the diverse materials in which they reside. Their stories are each unique. These ghosts demand to be heard in their eerie silences, their vague tonal apparitions. Listening to them acknowl­edges the neglected marks of history.