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The Society for a Subliminal State has published The Subliminal History of New York State: Route of Progress, a hardbound tunebook telling the subliminal history of the Erie Canal and beyond through shape note songs, stories, and written directions. The book contains 53 songs, all written by Carrie Dashow (text), and Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg (music) during the summer 2007 subliminal history tour of upstate New York.

Book Excerpt

Text accompanying “State School” from the Subliminal History of Rome, NY. (p. 36):

State Schools were state run facilities where many (often healthy) individuals were sent in the early to later 20th century. Stemming from the poorhouses of the 1800s, later the Rome Custodial Asylum for Unteachable Idiots State School. The State School originated in Rome: it served the entire state until others were established in every county in New York. (Rome also established the Colony system, which was much more mild form of incarceration, here patients worked as farm hands and domestic help with day passes.) People were admitted to the schools for varying reasons, from severe disablement, to eye twitches, poverty, and family trouble. One might go in healthy later come out, both mentally and physically incapacitated. The State Schools have a history of inoculating the healthy, conducting genetic studies etc.

The brutalities of the State Schools went into remission soon after they were uncovered nationally, in part by Geraldo Rivera’s Emmy-award-winning expose of Willowbrook State School (Staten Island, 1972) The public system soon changed and the State Schools dwindled and were closed. The state still owns the land. To Rome came the prisons. While dismantling the institution, to build the Mohawk-Oneida prison, workers tore down an old cement wall in the basement. Behind it they found a hidden room with no doors, shackles hanging from the walls and bones on the ground. No one knows how many people died and from what causes in the State Schools: the record-keeping was erratic. Many people still come to Rome to find their relatives and the historians shudder, thinking of what to tell them if they were residents of the State School. —Carrie Dashow 

Sample Page

“Cowhorn Creek,” a fuging tune from the Subliminal History of Vale Park, accompanied by text and instructions for participatory performance by Carrie Dashow.