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3 unusual facts about Charles Pickard Ware


Charles Pickard Ware

It is here that he transcribed many slave songs with tunes and lyrics, later published in Slave Songs of the United States which is the first collection of American folk music.

An abolitionist, he served as a civilian administrator in the Union Army, where he was a supervisor of freedmen on plantations at Port Royal, South Carolina during the Civil War.

Charles Ware

Charles Pickard Ware (1849–1921), American educator and folk music transcriber


Michael Row the Boat Ashore

Charles Pickard Ware, an abolitionist and Harvard graduate who had come to supervise the plantations on St. Helena Island from 1862 to 1865, wrote the song down in music notation as he heard the freedmen sing it.

Work song

The first collection of African American 'slave songs' was published in 1867 by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, Lucy McKim Garrison.


see also