THE FREEDOM SONG

A slender but personable story of the troubled years of the South, of masters and slaves, is lightly based on the origin of ""The Battle Hymn of the Republic"". Prome Oldrag, a Negro growing up on the plantation of the Vandamans, who had trouble thinking of their darkies as a crop, but considered them capital, was awarded a guitar for saving his young master's life. From the guitar came ""chunes"", one of which was the music for the Battle Hymn. Prome himself takes the freedom road only to return during the Civil War after the Emancipation Proclamation to help the Vandamans, and he dies trying to get a horse to his master at the front line. Plantation life, the folk ways and plight of the Negroes, the attitudes of the whites are delineated in personal terms, while the total situation is given from Prome's view as he interprets it, from the meeting with Captain Brown at a voodoo woman's hut to ""Mr. Lincoln's"" proclamation. Low-geared, simple, sound.