Set list from Saturday's abolitionist show at Brooklyn Historical Society

I'll try to add some more links to this later but for now here's what I played at Saturday's show at Brooklyn Historical Society. The show was a celebration of the anti-slavery movement in connection with their new exhibit In Pursuit of Freedom, an exploration of abolitionists in Brooklyn.

Thanks, Red Hook Ramblers, for being my band for the day and turning it into a real dance party!

(did I mention I'm going to start recording an album with RHR starting in early March featuring many of these songs?)

Tub-Tub-Ma-Ma-Ga-Ga

longtime fan favorite, appears on American History + Rock-n-Roll = The Deedle Deedle Dees in full rock band form and on S.S. Brooklyn in a stripped-down sing-a-long version

Down by the Riverside

old American spiritual 

Henry Box Brown

one of the Deedle Deedle Dees' signature songs, appears on Freedom in a Box

Marching Through Georgia

one of my favorite Civil War songs 

Trapped in the Attic

inspired by Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, original version written with fourth graders in Brooklyn

Sojourner Truth

appears on Strange Dees, Indeed, co-written with a kid in MA for a musical about the history of Northampton

Weeksville

brand-new song about Brooklyn's thriving all-black neighborhood, a community that arose after New York made slavery illegal... but pre-Civil War. 

, 

Follow the Drinking Gourd

awesome Underground Railroad song. we played a rock-n-roll arrangement that was a nod to the folky one Pete Seeger did with the Weavers 

Keep the Hate Mail Comin'

brand-new song I wrote after seeing an awful piece of hate mail sent to Henry Ward Beecher. a tribute to him, Hank Aaron, and other heroes who received vicious correspondence but kept on with their important work.

John Brown's Body / John Brown

the Union army marching song combined with one of the original Deedle Deedle Dees songs