"Flee as a Bird": Mary Dana Shindler's Legacy

By Patricia Woodard

In 1839, beset by the recent deaths of her husband, brother, sister, and infant son, twenty-seven-year-old mary Dana began to pour out her grief in verse. Although her diaries do not record when she first conceived of writing songs as such, she had expressed her disdain for the repertoire heard at an 1835 sacred concert in no uncertain terms: "Deliver us from such music." That deliverance came, in part, through the six song collections she would publish before her own death in 1883. Those songbooks would brilliantly document in music the wedding of American religious life and the antebellum reform impulse. While she faced difficulties common even to the relatively privileged women of nineteenth-century America—physical illness, widowhood, and economic hardship—her career represents a remarkable triumph: transforming love songs into sacred lyrics, she produced engaging compositions that are performed to this day, living links to the musical and reform cultures of her time.