In the spring of 1862, Lucy McKim, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Philadelphia abolitionist Quaker family, traveled with her father to the Sea Islands of South Carolina to aid him in his efforts to organize humanitarian aid for thousands of newly freed slaves. Hearing their singing during her stay, she determined to preserve as much of the music as she could. By the fall of 1862 she managed to have published the first serious musical arrangements of these songs.