This paper analyses the rhetoric and images white Jamaicans used to communicate what they “heard” during the annual holiday festivities of free and enslaved African Jamaicans in the West Indies to audiences in England who would never hear the live performances. White Jamaican audiences – often unwilling listeners – found themselves stunned by noise and struggled to find ways to describe their experiences and ascribe meaning to the sonic encounters they depicted. One anguished listener lambasted the holiday noises as “demonstrative arguments” that arose from the performers’ “Goombas, Banjas, Fiddles, Drums, Flutes, Jaw-bones, and other instruments of thunder and of terror.” When conveying information about events they found exotic or even “heathenish,” authors vividly described the singing, drumbeats, and clamorous instruments that accompanied African Jamaican holiday processions and their own physical and emotional reactions to the sounds. They frequently emphasised the enervating nature of repetition in song, tune, and cadence in attempting to convey the physical experience of hearing holiday noise.
The holiday celebrations provided a space of interactive noise-making and hearing. Some white newcomers admired the sounds they heard and encouraged elaboration while others complained vociferously about being subject to the noise and sought to control it. Whites with competing agendas drew on their sonic depictions of holiday events to argue about the evils of slavery or alternatively, to suggest that the celebrations showed the benign nature of West Indian slavery. In this manner, evocative depictions of African-Jamaican sound contributed to political claims about the social and economic foundations of West Indian policies and the sound of celebration crossed the Atlantic, if only in paper form.

In the history of North American street culture, perceptions of “noise” have shaped political discourse, and the prerogative to define undesirable public sound as “noise” has been a metric of power for four centuries. Urban soundscapes have been sites of contestation since the First Great Awakening of the 1740s, when the noise of revivalist crowds was a focus of horrified fascination: “The noise was like the roar of Niagara…At one time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.”1 The devaluation of African-based cultural expressions as “black noise” rationalized white dehumanization and control of black bodies and labor, while the infection of white soundscapes with black or brown inflections was regarded as dangerous and undesirable. Accelerating industrialization directly implicated class-based social tensions; by 1900, political authorities and their cultural arbiters explicitly conflated unregulated public noise with the uncontrolled public presence of subaltern bodies, most notoriously in various cities’ public campaigns against the cries of street vendors.

In this presentation, drawing on a larger project investigating cases from across four centuries, and employing methodologies from cultural geography, musicology, semiotics, and kinesthetics, I will situate “noise”—both sonic and visual—as an essential component of subaltern resistance throughout the political history of the Americas.

Orlando Gibbons’s The Cries of London (c. 1610) are among a number of musical works meant to emulate the cries of hawkers and peddlers in London’s street markets. While such works bend toward the idioms of madrigals, it is likely that Gibbons used the melodic fragments of real peddlers and thus record the sounds of the markets and made permanent the voices of lower-class people. Additionally, the aural effect of Gibbons’s works give listeners an experience of walking through the market as various voices pass by and do not return. Using the Agas Map, I will show the distribution of markets and areas of industry and chart the different sonic territories within the city. I will then explore similars record of street peddlers in visual art through the works of such works as Marcellus Laroon’s Cryes of the City of London (1687) and William Hogarth’s works such as the Skimmington print in the Hudibras series (1725) and The Enraged Musician (1741). I then place these works in the context of first-hand accounts of the street markets in the works of John Stow, Samuel Pepys, and Joseph Addison and the later work of Henry Mayhew entitled, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). While this study covers a broad range of time, this paper reveals commonalities and continuities between the early modern city and street culture of the early nineteenth century. By exploring such representation of street peddlers in music, visual art, and literature, one can see the lingering presence of the urban poor and their voices long after their contemporaries pass into obscurity. With this paper I seeks to map the territories marked by the sound and labor of such peoples and hope to illustrate and fuller picture of the life on the streets of pre-industrial London.