Amelia Dawley’s Mende Song

In 1933, Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a woman named Amelia Dawley in Georgia, USA, singing a song her family had passed down from their ancestors for generations. Neither Dawley nor her relatives knew the language, but Turner later identified it as Mende, a language spoken in Sierra Leone. In 1990, researchers found a woman named Baindu Jabati in southern Sierra Leone singing a nearly identical version of the same song. The match showed that the memory of Dawley’s enslaved ancestors had preserved one song across the Atlantic for nearly 200 years.

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