https://vimeo.com/215296650

Music: Henry T. Burleigh
Text: Walt Whitman

ETHIOPIA SALUTING THE COLORS.

 

WHO are you dusky woman, so ancient hardly human,

With your woolly-white and turban'd head, and bare bony feet?

Why rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?

 

('Tis while our army lines Carolina's sands and pines,

Forth from thy hovel door thou Ethiopia com'st to me,

As under doughty Sherman I march toward the sea.)

 

Me master years a hundred since from my parents sunder'd,

A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught,

Then hither me across the sea the cruel slaver brought.

 

No further does she say, but lingering all the day,

Her high-borne turban'd head she wags, and rolls her darkling
eye,

And courtesies to the regiments, the guidons moving by.

 

What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?

Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?

Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?

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Ethiopia Saluting the Colors

by Henry (Harry) T. Burleigh, 1866-1949

Although best remembered for his arrangements of African-American spirituals such as "Deep River" (1917), Harry T. Burleigh also made significant contributions to the American art song. Composed during the height of his success to a text by Walt Whitman, Burleigh's "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" (1915) is a dramatic account of an African-American woman, or Ethiopian (by the mid-nineteenth century, "Ethiopian" had become synonymous with "African" in the Western world), and her chance meeting with a Union Soldier.

In the poem, "Ethiopia" is an old black slave woman who salutes the American flag as she sees General Sherman's troops march by, all the while being watched herself by a soldier. The colors in her turban--yellow, red, and green--represent those found in the Ethiopian flag. Burleigh musically depicts the setting with a precise, militaristic accompaniment, and with the quotation of the Civil War tune "Marching through Georgia." One of Burleigh's most ambitious songs and one he later orchestrated, "Ethiopia Saluting the Colors" is worthy of inclusion in today's concert repertoire.