Hamilton Music Gets an Infusion of New Voices

Enthusiastic applause for the performance of “(The Slaves’ Lament) A Pipe Dream,” by Déanna Clarke-Campbell (CAS’21) (right), from Emma Henne (CAS’21) (from left), Christina Peterson (CAS’21), Mary Robbins (COM’20), and Megan Antone (COM’21).

Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU.

This time “The Room Where It Happens” is a BU classroom, and instead of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and other Founding Fathers, the singers and rappers are BU freshmen and sophomores.

The class is “Who Tells Your Story”: Historical Narrative and Popular Culture in Hamilton, a section of first-year writing seminar CAS WR150. Taught by graduate writing fellow Ethan King (GRS’22), it explores the cultural attitudes of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical, Hamilton, which turned America’s Founding Fathers into rap-battle stars, cast black and Latino actors as the all-white historical figures, and won 11 2016 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The students have definitely taken its rebellious spirit to heart for King’s last assignment, The Lost Hamilton Track: writing (and, optionally, performing) a new song for the show.

Joyce Yoon (CAS’21) wrote “Love, Theodosia” as a new ending for Hamilton, one that has Aaron Burr’s daughter demand that her father get a fair shake. Rapping the verses and singing the choruses to a backing track she found online, Yoon turns some of Miranda’s words back on him: “So just be aware when you’re calling him a zero/the villain in your story could be someone else’s hero…Though Hamilton might get all the glory/Everything depends:/Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.”

Her classmates cheer and clap, and teaching fellow King jumps to his feet, grinning as he blurts a streetwise evaluation: “That was (expletive) dope!”

Yoon hasn’t seen a live performance of the musical, but she’s intimately familiar with Miranda’s “next-level talent,” she says. “I think this class really made me think about how important perspective is when it comes to telling someone’s story,” she says. “It really depends on whose point of view is being presented, and that’s what I chose to write my song about.”

This is the second of three class sessions where students present their songs, which will also be explained, contextualized, and footnoted for their final major paper of the semester. Most read their lyrics aloud and talk about how and why they belong in Hamilton. Yoon is the first to dare performing in front of the group, but she’s not the last.

Claire Lee (Sargent’21) raps from the perspective of Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and mistress, who has a walk-on role but no lines in Hamilton. Hemmings tells off Hamilton and Jefferson before coming to her own story: “I have no history, no legacy inside my DNA/from infancy to captivity, I was born to be man’s prey.” That’s a nod to Pulitzer Prize–winning rapper Kendrick Lamar’s song “DNA” and “it’s not only a triple rhyme, but an iamb, so I’m really proud of that,” Lee says afterward.

“The class definitely opened my eyes in regard to what the musical lacks,” Lee says. “Yes, it’s a progressive play, but there’s so much that could have been done. If anything, this class has made me appreciate the musical even more. You can’t help but appreciate the ingenuity of Lin-Manuel Miranda. The references and allusions made are simply mind-blowing.”

Mary Robbins (COM’20) sings her “Peggy’s Lament,” ostensibly performed by the youngest of the three Schuyler sisters who appear in the musical. Seeing Peggy as a sort of proto-riot grrrl, Robbins—clad in a Hamilton T-shirt—sings over a karaoke track of Avril Lavigne’s 2002 pop-punk hit “Sk8er Boi”: “So call me divisive/I’m not indecisive/I know what I want out of this life.”

“This project has worked out so much better than I thought it would,” King says admiringly when she’s done.

Last fall, King taught a writing seminar called The Resistance Mixtape, which looked at politics in a variety of music genres. He says the week spent on Hamilton in that class “was exceptionally productive, but just scratched the surface of what this rich text can offer us,” and gave him the idea to do more.

WR150 is the second of two writing courses required of most undergraduates to help them acquire the skills needed for academic success. Instructors create sections of the course on a wide variety of topics. King, a rock drummer and hip-hop fan, saw Hamilton for the first time on Christmas break, after finishing his syllabus, which asks students to examine how Miranda worked with the historical facts and various musical components, particularly the playwright’s nods to hip-hop artists like Notorious B.I.G. It also discusses the show’s resonance in the era of the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements.

“I took this class because this was far and away the most interesting WR150 offered, and it’s been one of my top three college classes I’ve taken so far,” says Annabelle Winter (CAS’20), who saw Hamilton at the Public Theater in New York before it moved to Broadway. “This was the first chance this semester we really got to delve into everyone’s creative sides, so I was excited to see what people would bring, and everyone gave it their all.”

With 16 women in a class of 17 students, many of the Lost Hamilton Tracks focus, unsurprisingly, on women’s presence—or lack of presence—in the show. Others look at the role of religion, and especially, race.

The final performance on this day brings Déanna Clarke-Campbell (CAS’21) to the front of the room. “As a person of color who has always loved musicals, it is rare to see yourself on a stage,” she says. “People thought that Hamilton was a post-racial narrative, but it shrouded the slaves who were actually in the narrative at the time.”

Braids hanging past her waist, Clarke-Campbell cues up a backing track medley of the spiritual “Wade in the Water” and the song “Daddy Lessons,” and begins to sing her own lyric, “(The Slaves’ Lament) A Pipe Dream,” recounting how both sides in the Revolution wooed slaves to fight for them, offering promises of freedom that were seldom kept. “When the war is done/Worn and lame we will look on/A country torn apart, still/three-fifths is what we are,” she sings.

The room explodes in cheers, applause, and a tear or two. “We were just visited by a higher something,” Winter says to general agreement.

“This has been the highlight of my life as a teacher,” King says a few minutes later, watching the students file out.

Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.

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