William Francis Allen, the chief editor and author of the introduction to Slave Songs of the United States, was born in Massachusetts in 1830, studied at Harvard and in Europe, worked for the Freedmen's Aid Commission on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, during the Civil War, and after the war became chair of ancient languages at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Like his cousin William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware took part in wartime educational initiatives in the Sea Islands of South Carolina; more of the transcriptions in the volume are Ware's than any other editor's.