Save from Oblivion

Save From Oblivion:
Osborne Perry Anderson’s Body

By Andy “River” Peterson 

with production, support, or advice from Harli Saxon, Malcolm Davis, Jess Mullins Fullen, Requiem, Chad Clark, and Betsy Podsialdo.

Save from Oblivion is a musical multimedia theater production in development by an interracial group of creatives at the MidMountain arts collective that  highlights the unsung stories of Osborne Perry Anderson, the sole black survivor of the Harpers Ferry raiding party, as narrated by Mary Ann Shadd Cary—his near lifelong collaborator, as well as a Black female publishing and legal pioneer with ties to Howard University.

Save from Oblivion contrasts the popular legacies of Anderson and John Brown, the leader of the Harpers Ferry Raid who has achieved near mythic status and is still sung about today in the classic folk tune “John Brown’s Body,” including their treatment after death. Although the site of Brown’s body is marked with a massive boulder at a family homestead that is now a New York State Historic Site, Columbian Harmony Cemetery—the original burial site of Anderson, Shadd Cary, and tens of thousands of other Black bodies—was displaced in a wave of burial gentrification just before the Civil Rights era. Anderson’s initial resting place is now the site of the Rhode Island Metro Station and a shopping center.

But a story can still save you from oblivion, even when you lose a place.

Our project recenters the narratives of Anderson, Shadd Cary, and others too often overlooked when we hear the story of overthrowing slavery in America – including support figures as exemplified by Brown’s widow Mary Ann Day Brown – by re-writing the lyrics of “John Brown’s Body” and using the melody as a leitmotif amid original musical numbers that incorporate sounds from sites related to the real life events in combination, readings from the historical record, and projected visuals including source documents as well as photography of sites related to the story in a performance that forces the audience to consider whose stories we chose to remember.

We hope to finalize development of the project as a barebones production requiring a trio of performers, digital projection, and a minimal sound system to perform so it can be easily presented or adapted.

Thanks to MidAtlantic Arts and its Central Appalachian Living Traditions Program for making an initial production possible in Spring 2025. 

Spring 2025 Production Book