Cuba Plantation Dance

Philadelphia: Edward L. Walker, 142 Chestnut St., above 6th, 1855. Folio sheet music, pictorial lithographed cover, approximately 13.5 × 10.5 inches. Light edge wear and minor toning; very good with a strong impression of the cover illustration.. An antebellum piano dance reflecting the plantation imagery that circulated widely in mid-nineteenth-century American popular music. “Cuba Plantation Dance” was composed by Chas. H. Wilson, a little-documented composer whose name appears chiefly in connection with this work, and issued in Philadelphia during the early 1850s by Edward L. Walker, the predecessor firm to the major publishing house Lee & Walker. A copy is recorded in the Levy Collection at Johns Hopkins, which dates the publication to 1855.

The cover presents a stylized plantation landscape framed by tall stalks of sugar cane with a small central vignette of a dancing Black figure. The use of Cuban plantation imagery reflects contemporary American fascination with the Caribbean sugar economy and with plantation life beyond the United States. During the 1850s Cuba was one of the largest slave societies in the Atlantic world. By the midcentury the island’s sugar plantations relied on hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, and the enslaved population of Cuba was estimated at roughly 400,000 people in the 1840s–1850s, working primarily in the rapidly expanding sugar industry. Although Spain formally agreed to end the Atlantic slave trade in 1820, illegal importations of enslaved Africans into Cuba continued for decades, supplying labor for the island’s plantations well into the 1850s. American publishers frequently borrowed such imagery for plantation-themed dance music marketed to the parlor trade. Pieces labeled “plantation dances” or “Ethiopian dances” formed part of the broader culture of minstrel and plantation entertainment. The title page bears a dedication to “Miss Arabelle Conrad,” typical of mid-century sheet music addressed to amateur pianists. Along with the aforementioned copy in the Levy collection, we find copies at Michigan and Temple.