Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen

  Midi version of the bar of music.

"Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" is one of the "Ten master songs...of undoubted Negro origin and wide popular currency, and songs peculiarly characteristic of the slave." Du Bois writes further that "When, struck with a sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, a brigadier-general went down to the Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept." Du Bois probably got this story from "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Had" in Allen, Ware, and McKim, Slave Songs of the United States. That book has sheet music to another verion of the song, with different music and verses. According to Sundquist, the melody and words come from Fenner, Hampton and Its Students (To Wake the Nations 676n46).

The general mentioned was the head of the Freedmen's Bureau, General Howard. Eric Sundquist, in To Wake the Nations (494), says that the song can be traced — perhaps apocryphally — to a slave whose wife and children had just been sold away.

• An unknown older version from www.africanamericanspirituals.com.
• Leadbelly's version.
• The Hampton verion of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," sheet music from Hampton and its Students. By Two of its Teachers, Mrs. M. F. Armstrong and Helen W. Ludlow. With Fifty Cabin and Plantation Songs, Arranged by Thomas P. Fenner (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1874) Electronic Edition. This is probably the version Du Bois used, as the music matches. It also contains the story about General Howard.
• A page of sheet music from Theodore F. Seward, ed. Jubilee Songs: Complete. As Sung by the Jubilee Singers, of Fisk University (New York: Biglow & Main, 1872), from "Lift Every Voice," University of Virginia Library. Du Bois took the music from another version.

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