At The Purchaser's Option, a song off of Rhiannon Giddens' 2017 album, Freedom Highway. This song sings the laments of the slave market in the early United states. Inspired by a historical ad that she saw for a slave that was to be sold, Giddens wrote At The Purchaser’s Option. This song follows the story of an enslaved woman who was about to be sold, with, or without her 9-month-old baby; whether she kept her child was at the purchaser’s option. The opening stanza says, “I've got a babe but shall I keep him/'Twill come the day when I'll be weepin'/But how can I love him any less/This little babe upon my breast”. In an NPR interview with Terry Gross, for the Fresh Air podcast, Rhiannon expresses her awe with this premise, “I mean, it's - for me, the - that whole story is just - it just shows the absolute commonplaceness of it, which also shows how horrible that is, you know, that that's commonplace” (NPR).
This is not an outright protest song, but it does highlight a specific and chilling part of history that otherwise would have likely been left unsaid. Amplifying scenarios that actually happened, like an enslaved woman being sold with or without her baby, spread awareness of this topic. For example, during the textile strikes, a woman by the name of Ella May wrote the song, “The Mill Mother’s Lament,” which pulls out a narrative of a mother who works in a textile mill, not being able to clothe her children. These small narratives create a pit in the stomach of the listener, reminding them that this horrible thing happened and it can never happen again.
