Hyde Hall Talks: Nancy Newman, Author, Professor of Music at SUNY Albany

Songs and Sounds of the Anti-Rent Movement in Upstate New York by Nancy Newman analyzes the music and poetry of the tenant farmer protests.

The Anti-Rent Movement in upstate New York is often viewed as the United States’ last major conflict rooted in feudal landholding practices. During the 1840s, tenant farmers in the Hudson–Mohawk region organized protests against large land monopolies that controlled the farms they worked. They promoted their cause through newspapers, broadsides, rallies, and especially through poetry and song. More than twenty lyric sets and one instrumental piece emerged from the movement, drawing on familiar tunes like Old Dan Tucker and Bruce's Address. This book brings these songs together for the first time, offering historical analysis, reconstructed musical scores, and discussion of how later literature, film, and commemorations have interpreted the movement’s legacy.