Thanks to a new musical, Frederick Douglass dances into pop culture

Not only sings, but dances, too. That dignified figure staring out of countless black-and-white images now moves to the beat of a score by Nashville-based country music composer Marcus Hummon. “Of course he danced!” declared the musical’s director and co-book writer, Charles Randolph-Wright. “I mean, he met his wife at a dance. He was fascinated by everything; he learned violin late in his life. He had that mind that did not stop, that inquisitive mind.”

“We wanted to humanize him, because he’s held up on this pedestal as this iconic figure from history,” Morris said in a Zoom interview. The scale and intensity of Douglass’s fame and advocacy were prodigious, particularly on the issue of ending slavery, but also on education, voting rights and equality for women. “I know, being in the family and also working with scholars that have researched my family,” Morris added, “that the stories about him that humanize him are just fantastic.”

It’s hard to imagine how the story of Douglass’s remarkable life and achievements — the escape from slavery and campaigning for emancipation, his careers as statesman and publisher, his peerless oratory — might be compressed into a couple of hours of exposition and song. Which also seems to have occurred to the creative team. They decided to narrow their focus to events in his biography leading up to the Civil War — a time Randolph-Wright calls Douglass’s “badass period, his activist period, his insurgent period, when he was in his 40s, when he was becoming the American prophet.”

For Hummon, a Grammy-winning songwriter who has composed for the likes of Tim McGraw, Wynonna Judd and the Dixie Chicks, it was the realization that Douglass’s own writings could propel the show’s melodies that cemented his creative path. “It ultimately was the poetry of his language that did it, that I started to hear music,” Hummon explained. “If you say, ‘It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,’ I mean, that’s verse. There are times when his oration and his writing simply shift in gear and become poetry.”

Hummon had embarked on a modest song cycle about Douglass, after reading one of his three autobiographies that was performed at a Nashville church in the mid-2010s. “It was nice and I enjoyed it, but I kept reading and when I got to ‘Life and Times [of Frederick Douglass],’ then I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a huge story here,’ ” Hummon said. “I don’t know. I didn’t fully grasp it. And maybe I still don’t, still trying to, but I knew I needed help. I needed a writer-director to work with. And I had friends who said, ‘Yeah, we know who the guy is.’ ”